Considering we have recently been seeing a lot of speculation surrounding the rumored deep integration of Facebook into iOS 6, I am not entirely sure whether the recent release of the FacebookThis tweak has been put together to take advantage of the current hype or is entirely coincidental. Either way, the package is available in Cydia now for jailbroken iOS 5 devices and allows users to post images directly from within the Photos app to their Facebook timeline.
With Apple looking likely to make an announcement at the Worldwide Developers Conference regarding the integration of Facebook, a lot of users are looking forward to being able to share information directly with their Facebook friends through the use of sharing options littered throughout the operating system. For those among us who believe in visual sharing and don’t have the patience to wait and see what Apple are planning, then the FacebookThis tweak should certainly provide some social sharing medicine.
After installation, the package doesn’t append the home screen with any additional icons, nor does it come with its own preferences panel through the Settings app. Instead, FacebookThis directly alters the menu that can be called up when viewing an individual image using the action button on the tool bar. When the menu is invoked, a new Facebook option has been added by the developer, something that we are expecting to see officially with the release of iOS 6. Tapping the new Facebook option will produce a user-facing alert that contains the selected image as well as a text field allowing a short message to be posted with the image.
Like all applications and tweaks that communicate with Facebook, this package requires an initial authorization process to be completed before any images can be posted, but this is a one-off step that need not be repeated. When complete, the image and any entered text are posted directly to the user’s Facebook timeline for the world to see. I can see this package being extremely popular with users considering the huge member-base which Facebook has, but Apple’s next major release of iOS could see this tweak be made redundant.
FacebookThis is available as a free of charge download from the BigBoss repository and requires iOS 5 or above to be installed.
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