Facebook Chat Heads Hit IOS Later Today

Facebook CTO Cory Ondrejka announced at the D: Dive into Mobile conference that chat heads would be arriving on the Facebook iOS app later today. Chat heads is a Facebook Home feature where instead of receiving a simple text notification about a new Facebook message  you instead see a bubble with the head of the person who the message is from.

The idea is to make facebook messaging more personal so instead of thinking I have a new message, you should be thinking Joe Blogs is messaging me again.

Chat heads is available for Android users on Facebook Home  and Facebooks CEO Mark Zuckerberg indicated at the company’s press event that an iOS version of Facebook Home was unlikely but not impossible due to the OS integration require. IOS6 saw Facebook authentication integration however this would involve a much deeper integration into IOS to shows Facebook’s information on the home screen.

As a iPad app developer in Los Angeles we’ll be very interested to see if Facebook Home integrates with IOS. The iphone app developer community would love to see more IOS integration as the apps are sandboxed which limits the functionality and creativity. We often get approached to create apps which need some kind of IOS integration and have to tell potential clients that all the functionality they would like isn’t available in the OS.