Ill bite.

An app can provide notifications, integration and speed. An app can do a lot more caching than the app, and will never have to reload a version of its own code. There's places were apps are appropriate, and this is one of them.

I understand some folks like to recieve fb message notifications as if they were email I guess. Don't feel the need myself.

I guess I'm just questioning the need for an app for all things, when many of the things are just as well served by a decent page in a browser.

Facebook is currently the best IM platform in terms of functionality, stability and ubiquity. In that light, notifications are important.

They also have the best automatic presence detection, it's miles ahead of iMessage in that (and almost every other) regard. I want to dislike it, but Facebook has done a stellar job making their messaging system bullet-proof.

I just downvoted you by accident, sorry. Maybe someone who really disagrees with parent can vote him up instead? :-)

The previous post gave more reasons that 'notifications'. Read it more carefully - the important one is 'integration' which covers a host of possible behaviour.

One example - uploading photos straight from the camera. This is a html5 api but the browser support is appalling: http://caniuse.com/stream

More examples - integration with contacts? (i.e. appearing as an option next to call/text etc). Registering under the 'share' menu in Android? Registering as an Intent where appropriate? Ability to run background tasks?

I don't know if Facebook uses these but there's certainly good reasons for an service with it's wide spread of potential functionality to do so.

Those are good reasons for some people, sure. I guess I still see FB as 'just a page' rather than an full, integrated comms service.

I really don't want it as a full integrated comms service!