Birthday CalendarThere are two things I’m very sure of.  One, Facebook is increasingly the new internet.  One recent article I read said it makes up 25% of US internet page views.  There doesn’t seem to be a way to stop it.  The second thing I’m sure of is that the Facebook Birthday Calendar application is the most useful application on the site.  It is one of my primary reasons for being there.  And now, they have an iPhone application that brings all that to your fingertips.

In a recent review, I mentioned how to get the birthdays of all your Facebook friends into your calendar.  With this app, that is not necessary.  Instead of needing your calendar app in order to notify you of a friend or relative’s birthday, this $1.99 app will do that for you.  The interface is what you would expect from a quality application.  The person’s profile picture is displayed along with their birthday.  It also displays if you have alerts set for the individual and if you have contacted them and how.  Tapping their entry will bring up a page of options to view their Facebook profile, write on their wall, email them, call them, send them a Facebook gift, send them a text message, and so forth.  You can also set whether to give you alerts to this person’s birthday.

Application options include what time of day you want to be alerted, whether you want an alert 3 days or 7 days ahead of time, the email address you want to use for reminders (in addition to application alerts), how many events you want downloaded at one time, and which national and/or religious holidays you want to also show up on the calendar. And, if your friend or relative is not on Facebook, there is an option to add in their information manually.  And, as you would expect, any changes to your settings on the application will sync to your online Facebook Birthday Calendar.

My only complaint about the application is minor.  When you sign in with your Facebook email and later enter your email address for alerts, you do so with the default iPhone keyboard.  It would be nice if your alert email defaulted to your Facebook email and if it used that email-friendly keyboard layout that had the “at” symbol and period on it.  Also, it would be nice if there was a way to link a Facebook Friend to their contact entry in your iPhone address book without it actually marking them as having received an email, text message, or phone call.  I would think that this would fit nicely in the Modify window of the Friend Details where you can currently edit their name, add a birth year, or mark if the year is unknown.

As far as suggestions go, there are probably limits to what Facebook and the iPhone would allow.  If possible, it would be nice to have an option to update contact info in the address book with new friends’ profile pictures and birthdays.  If there was a way to capture or cut-and-paste contact information from the person’s Facebook profile information screen and get that into their iPhone contact record, that would be cool as well.  I’d also like to see an option to go the other way with information.  If the application could scan your contacts in your address book and find any records with a birthday field and automatically add those or link those to the Facebook list, that would be a plus as well.  Finally, with an option to go to your own profile, this application could even replace the native Facebook iPhone app.  You can still view your news feed, change your status, and so forth, but it takes a jump to your page from the profile page of one of your friends to get there.

Overall, I’d give this application 9 out of 10 stars.  It’s almost perfect and makes my Must Have list.  If you would like to give the application a spin without spending the $1.99, you can check out the free lite version that  disables the option to call/text/email your birthday greetings.