Over the past months we’ve followed closely the development of Friends, an iPhone app by Taptivate that aims at changing the way you stay in touch with your friends on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Version 1.0 was released in December, and the developers quickly iterated with version 1.5 released in February adding Read It Later support and improved notifications.

Friends 1.6, released a few minutes ago, is another major update to the app that introduces redesigned sections, powerful search functionalities and completely revamped Facebook support. Friends can now upload photos to Facebook, and users can also comment on photos posted on Facebook. This kind of integration with the service was highly requested in the previous versions, and works just as advertised. Furthermore, the app is now capable of searching for friends across Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn — again, a welcome addition that uses a beautiful toolbar running along the top of the app.

Every post comes with its own timestamp in version 1.6, and every post can also be retweeted at any time from within the timeline. The interface has been refined and looks more gorgeous than ever; I also noticed syncing times seem to be improved with this latest update.

Last, Friends is on sale at $0.99 in the App Store. Go get it now, as it’s an amazing deal for a great iPhone app. More screenshots below. (more…)

How do you keep contacts from your local iPhone address book, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social networks in one single, unified place? That’s the question Taptivate aims at answering with its latest app for the iPhone — the much anticipated Friends.

In the era of social networking, social graphs and Twitter trends, it’s not easy to keep up with the stream of information. We all know that. But at a wider level, it’s not simple to keep up with the people behind those information, either. Sometimes, we struggle to find a person’s contact details because we don’t know where to look. The iPhone’s address book is a thing of its own, even if Apple managed to deploy sync for contacts in MobileMe. Sync alone, however, doesn’t come to the rescue when it’s about integration with all the social services we’re subscribed to. Nor do giants like Facebook and Google help, continuously fighting with each other over contact exports and proper email access.

If most of our social connections happen online nowadays, what’s the best way to make the pieces come together in a single package? According to Taptivate, that would be an iPhone app. Friends is a beautiful contact manager and aggregator for iPhone, an app that picks contacts from your local address book and integrates them with the online services you use on a daily basis. (more…)

We’ve been keeping an eye on Taptivate’s Friends (nèe Contacts+) for a few months. When I was shown a first preview of the app, I saw a rock-solid app for iPhone capable of aggregating all your contacts from Facebook and Twitter in a single interface. It looks like the guys at Taptivate have been working hard on making the app even better, and basing on the trailer that was posted earlier today it seems like we definitely have to wait for the app to show up in the App Store.

The trailer shows us that the app will be able to pull contacts from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Myspace and your iPhone’s Address Book. You’ll also be able to check on links and photos posted by your friends, call them using a built-in dialpad, send updates to multiple social networks at once.

Check out the video below. We look forward to see if Friends by Taptivate will manage to reinvent our iPhone contacts. We sure hope so.