I was going to write a rather lengthy review of it. But put simply, there’s no need to write a review about a phone which has already picked up numerous awards and won over the hearts and souls of anyone who has been brave enough to take a leap of fate with a companies very first phone to the market! It really is that damn good!

Three have made a big deal out of the Facebook integration. It’s hard to fault it really, as it allows one touch access to all the functions of the fastest growing social network. There is one thing better than “one touch access” though and that’s “no touch access”! And through the INQs handy widget feature, this is possible.

As it stands, there’s no widgets available for download on the INQ. At least not in Ireland anyway. We can add up to 3 RSS feeds to be included on the Home screen though, and this is where we’re given the opportunity to add a Facebook related widget. Facebook might not advertise their RSS feeds very well, but they are there, at least in some sections of their site. By adding them, we can have up to the minute (well, up the hour) updates about our friends statuses and our own notifications. It all sounds good, doesn’t it? Now lets find those feeds.

First we’ll add find the “Notifications” feed. This feed lets you know of any changes to your profile, such as new friend requests, new profile comments and application related messages. To find it, go to the Notifications page. You won’t be able to access it unless you’re logged in, so make sure you are before clicking! Once we’re there, you’ll see a heading in one of the sidebars called “Subscribe to Notifications”. Right click the link that’s directly below this and copy the address and paste it somewhere where you can see it later (a Word or Notepad document for example)

Now we have to find the Status Updates feed. Click on the “Friends” link at the top of the page which will bring you to the Status Updates page. Look for the header “Subscribe” and once again right click the link that’s directly below this and copy the address and paste it to the same place as you did the first feed. You now have everything to need to start feeding this all this data onto your phone.

There are two ways you can proceed from here. You can either follow this guide which will show you how to set up two seperate widgets that will update every hour, or you can be inventive and use what’s known as a feed merging service such as Yahoo! Pipes. The advantage of using a feed mixer is that you’ll only have one feed for all notifications and status updates which will free up space on the screen. The disadvantage is that many of websites that provide these services go down often meaning you’ll be finding yourself constantly looking for alternatives. Yahoo! Pipes is probably the most reliable of them all, but it’s not the most user friendly piece of kit and would take twice the length of this guide to explain properly!

Anyway, we’ll carry on. Assuming you have the addresses of the two feeds pasted into a window somewhere, we can now add the feeds to the phone. Hit the “Menu” button of the phone and scroll to “Feeds”. Hit “options” and select “Add a feed”. In the screen that appears, manually enter in the Feed address, making sure you don’t make any mistakes. Once the feed is added, update it when prompted. Now we’ll set it to update every hour. Go into “Options” once again and select “Auto Update”. Select “Once an Hour” from the options. This ensures that the feed is kept as up to date as possible. To add the other feed, simply repeat the steps of creating a new feed and entering it’s address.

Once both feeds are added, go back into the main menu and select “Tools”. From here we select “manage widgets”. Mark the boxes “RSS Widget 1″ and “RSS Widget 2″ (if you intend on adding both feeds) and hit “Done”. Go back into the Home screen (this is the desktop of the phone) and select the newly added widgets that are prompting you to “Add a Feed”. Select one of the feeds from the list and click done. If you want to add the second feed, simply select the other widget and add the remaining feed to it.

If everything has worked properly, you’ll now find yourself with 2 widgets on the Home screen, both relating to Facebook. One of them lists your friends 10 most recent status changes (eg: Adam is tired), while the other one is solely for notifications (eg: Adam has wrote on your wall). They’ll both be set to update every hour which should be regularly enough to keep you informed of everything Facebook related – unless you’re completely addicted.

If you want a little bit more from them, then I’d recommend you check out Yahoo! Pipes to really have fun with the feeds! If you’re having any problems, leave me a comment and I’ll try help!

Just a little word of warning to finish this piece off. Unless you’re on a Data plan, you’ll probably be charged through the teeth for refreshing these feeds every hour. If ever there was a phone that needed a data package, this is it!

Two years and four months a go, I noticed a blatant security and privacy flaw on Bebo. In fact, I blogged about it at the time and it received a lot of attention, doing the rounds on all the social-bookmarking sites which were also growing in popularity. In fact, A search for “Bebo” on Google ranked my blog first! The end result of my lobbying was that Bebo created a two-tier friendship system which is now known as Direct Friends and Indirect Friends. Direct Friends see your contact details, indirect friends don’t! A simple, but pivotal change in what was to be Bebos’ rise to the top of the social networking ladder!

Michael Birch said it on my blog that Bebo was initially a contact sharing website but had morphed into a full-scale social networking site like MySpace. By implementing the necessary changes needed to ensure that only direct friends could see your contact details, Bebo allowed themselves to target and explore new markets, now as a social networking site! Bebo soon rose in popularity thanks to its ease of use, speed, reliability and the fact that it was something new – a change from MySpace.

Bebo then started making headlines worldwide, but for all the wrong reasons. With a lack of political scandals, Bebo appeared on RTEs PrimeTime. All the stories worldwide focused on the common sight of pornography and underage drinking, but I often wonder had I not inspired the changes to the site, how the media would have reacted to being readily being able to get the contact details of teenagers! Bebo got lucky in that when the spotlight swung their way, they weren’t standing there in their underwear and had implemented just enough changes to avoid being totally torn apart by the media!

Having successfully negotiated the hurdle that is the media circus, Bebo started to make a drive to the top. Firstly they introduced skins and while they were initially thin on the ground, they finally allowed users to customise their page in a one click process. They then expanded this to allow for user created skins which had to be accepted by Bebo themselves. This ensured that a small quantity of high quality skins became available but skins were slow to be released and people slanted towards the same type of skins meaning that soon everybody’s page started to look the same again! This all changed when Bebo allowed any member to release skins! Granted, the quality of the skins has dropped like a stone but now there’s no shortage of user-created content and if you can’t find what you’re looking for, you can follow a simple tutorial and have your own within minutes! I even made my own!

Once Bebo introduced skins, they followed in the footsteps of MySpace and launched Bebo Bands. It initially boasted a small selection of relatively unknown bands, some were pretty good, some were awful. Some would argue that it hasn’t taken off at all, but its constantly growing as bands and record labels realise that an exclusive presence on the dominant MySpace simply isn’t enough! Bebo then tried their hand at becoming a place for authors to showcase their work. It got the support of a few mainstream authors but I got the feeling that Bebo was trying too hard to be too many things! In the end, Bebo Authors became an outlet for depressed teenagers poetry and much like the themes in the said poems, Bebo Authors died a slow death.

Interestingly, while MySpace had an open development community for widgets, Bebo decided to close theirs. At least initially. Whereas on MySpace anyone could theoretically create an application for their homepage, Bebo required developers, usually big advertisers, to pay for exclusivity. While this was like printing money for them, it deviated from the trend that was towards being driven by user-created content. Some could argue that having closed development was a good thing as it meant that users pages weren’t cluttered with nonsensical widgets and those that were there, served a valid purpose! Bebo have since released their development kit and now pages are filled with widget after widget. It may be annoying to have to navigate through widget infested profiles, but at the end of the day it’s what people want and Bebo have met this demand!

So, of everything I’ve just mentioned, what’s my feature introduced to Bebo? I’m going to be a bit strange and say the visitor tracking map! It’s not that I want to keep tabs on who’s checking up on me, but I think Bebo hit the nail on the head as it satisfies our curiousity and tackles a security issue too!

Where will Bebo go in the future? I posted by own outlook of the future of social networking two years a go and was totally wrong, so I’m not even going to guess!