Microsoft releases broken Zune HD Facebook application

I received an email last night from the Zune team that their free Facebook application was finally released for the Zune HD. You all know how much I enjoy my FC Sounders custom Zune HD and we heard that this Facebook application would be released with the Twitter app before the end of 2009. It turns out Twitter made it in time, but Facebook took a bit longer to launch. I loaded up the application, through a WiFi connection with a Palm Pre Plus, and started testing it out last night at my daughter's soccer practice. It looks to be a decent application with a bit of Zune integration, but when it launched I found it only lets you update your Zune listening status, view your profile info, and view your own photos. There is something major messed up with the Facebook permission settings that is not allowing users to do anything else with the application. It seems Microsoft is aware of the issue is apparently working to fix it. I will walk you through the application as it currently appears, but can't post a video of it in action since not much works at this time.

The Zune HD Facebook application has four main icons up at the top showing Home, You, Friends, and Messages. The application works in portrait with landscape mode supported for viewing photos. Let's take a look at each main section of the program below and I will update when Microsoft gets the application working properly.
Home

When you launch the Zune HD application you will see a basic login with your email and password fields and Log in button. After logging in then you go right to Home with your News Feed and a box for you to enter a status update. I could not get a regular text status update posted at all while the Zune music ones worked fine. You will also see a small Zune icon to the left of the status box. Tapping on the Zune icon allows you to share the song title you are listening to and after tapping it a text entry box opens up with light letters stating Comment on (song title here). You can then enter text related to the song and post that along with the song status. Just tapping the Zune icon without entering any info is valid too and after you do you will see the album art, title, artist, and hyperlink directly to that song over on Zune.net. These updates are posted and seem to be a good way to share with others and give them something useful to get that song too if they desire. For example, here is a Zune.net link to a recent song I was listening to.


Along the second row from the top you will find the next option over for Status Updates. This is similar to News Feed, but will show slightly different info for your friend's status updates. Lastly, you can tap the word Photos and eventually should see your friend's photos. We don't yet know what you will be able to do with the status updates and photos, but we should be able to like/dislike and make comments.
You

This next icon over on the top shows information about you, broken down into Info, Photos, and Wall. Info shows your last status update, hometown, birthday, websites, and other profile info. The Photos section shows your albums with the number of photos on one thumbnail and other photo info. Tapping on the album opens it up and then you can view individual photos, see any tags and description of the photo along with any comments people have made on the photo. You can also leave a comment yourself. There is a back arrow to always go back to the previous level of the application, found on the lower left corner. The Wall area shows your wall and lets you also post a Zune or text status update.
Friends

Tapping on the icon that shows two people (3rd from the left) takes you to your Friends page. There are two small icons at the top for list view and the other for thumbnail view of your friends along with a search friends box to the right of these icons. This page doesn't currently load up on my Zune HD so this section is still to be developed.
Notifications and Settings

You will see a back arrow in the bottom left corner of the application. The center icon is for Notifications and tapping that slides up a shade with your most recent notifications. You can tap See All to see more notifications and also tap the hyperlinks in the notifications for your friend, your post, your status, etc. Tapping again closes the notifications.

On the right side of the bottom bar you will see a wrench icon that opens up your Options. Options in the Facebook application include showing your latest status update, Shake to Reload toggle, and Auto Reload toggle. Auto Reload options are available for 1 minute, 2 minutes, 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 60 minutes, and off. There is also a button to log out of Facebook.

Along the top you can see the word Terms too if you want to view the terms of service for the application.
Overall comments and experiences

You will find the word Reload in several areas and tapping this forces a manual refresh of the area where you are currently at in the application. You can also drag down the display to reload/refresh, similar to some iPhone Twitter apps I have seen before.

After logging in once, the next time you launch Facebook you will see your email and hidden password, but your Zune HD should log you in without you having to reenter this information.

While the application looks to have lots of functionality and is easy to navigate, I couldn't get much to load up so can't comment much on how useful the application is. The Zune status updates worked like a champ though and I understand that may be the only real reason to use this application on your Zune HD, but the rest needs to work too and Microsoft should not have rolled it out unless it was fully functional.
What is up with the failed launch?

According to this Zune.net forum there are supposed to be 6 different settings in your Facebook for Zune HD application on your Facebook web page. Most all of us only see two settings so this is the problem that Microsoft has to solve before you can really even use the application. Here are the 6 settings you should eventually see on Facebook:

    * Access my home and profile stream (Wall)
    * Read and send messages from my mailbox
    * Read messages from my mailbox
    * Access my data even when I'm not using the application
    * Send me emails
    * Publish to streams

As of now, the only two most all of us have is:

    * Access my data even when I'm not using the application
    * Publish recent activity (one line stories) to my wall

Does the Facebook for Zune HD application appeal to you? I can't stand the Facebook website so can see using this every once in a while when I am couch surfing with my Zune HD and the sharing song capability may be useful.

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