Keep in mind they haven't done anything on this yet. It's still just speculation and a patent filing – which might not come to anything.

I think it is a nice idea. Is it Apple staying competitive? That just doesn't sound like something Apple really cares about at this point, giving such visibility to a non-Apple entity. Is it more trouble for Apple than it is worth, especially with all the privacy concerns lately?

I don't agree that your concern is equivalent to being overly paranoid. I too would prefer to see Facebook segregated from my contacts and not too integrated with my system. Though the market for such a thing apparently does exist, I hope there will be some way to disable it without much angst.

I limit my time on FB, don't have a farm and I'm not a gangster. I also like my privacy. Hope this development does not become a nightmare for folks like me. We'll see.

If I was popular, I'd probably like events being added directly to the system calendar.

That being said, Orbit already does what I need, and I am not a conspiracy believer, but I do think that Facebook sells out (and will continue to do so) personal information, so I'd like them to not be baked in to the OS.

I am also very leery about what iAD will mean for someone like me who hates ads; I am still bitter that when I go to a flick they advertise Coca-Cola and Motorola.

If (as I hope) a new technology comes along *cough* Diaspora *cough* that allows distributed peer to peer social networking and lets the user maintain control of his own data, and if this new technology is embraced by the masses, then integrating Facebook tightly with the iPhone will have been a mistake.

In any case, it's remarkable that Apple – who says they won't allow Adobe's Flash or Sun's Java to control their user experience – is now putting all their eggs in Facebook's basket.

Think about it, privacy or not (not sure why on earth people would be 'personal' things on there. I mainly vent on there, and don't particularly care who sees that) quite a few people have Twitter and Facebook accounts…

I thought about the 'just don't use it' possibility. Hopefully that would be easy enough to do. What worries me a little about that though is that I do still want to use Facebook on occasion. So for instance the Facebook app knows my FB credentials. I wouldn't like to have to choose between being logged into FB, which might automatically enable some of that 'integration' or having to login to it each time to avoid that automated flow. I may just be being overly paranoid on this.

I agree with you though that for many people Facebook integration may be very welcome – I'm just absolutely not one of them 🙂

I know I wouldn't use Facebook integration because I want to keep my contacts and facebook contacts separated.

Funny though, my fiancee spent a few days with her friend who owns a "Google phone" (she wasn't sure which one). Anyways, the first thing my fiancee told me about the phone was "it's awesome, she's got all her contacts synchronized with Facebook". Not for me (or you), but there definitely is an audience for this.

Sebastien