I’ve always wanted everybody to use Facebook as their phone book — which is why I’ve replaced the Phone icon on my iPhone’s dock with that big blue F — if only just so I stop getting requests to join “Lost phone, need numbers” groups. It’s the old promise of Plaxo et al: an online address book that updates itself automagically on all the devices you own and will own whenever your contact updates his/her info. It’s part of the reason why I was so attracted to the Pre — and Synergy in webOS in particular if you want to nitpick — in the first place 12 months ago, and to a lesser extent part of the reason why Android 2.0 and its account manager API got me to take a more serious look at that OS. Finally, phones that have built–in support for a mainstream online contacts database. I’m hoping iPhone OS 4 will have something like Synergy built–in, but until then I suppose we can have this stopgap solution.

That said, even though I had explicitly not enabled the “Replace photos” option, Facebook still felt it had the right to slap people’s profile photos on to my iPhone address book, on top of the ones that I had handpicked and curated myself because most people’s Facebook profile pics are so frickin’ terrible.

And at least have the frickin’ courtesy to replace it with the thumbnail versions rather than scaled–down versions of the full–blown profile pics! Stop ruining what could’ve been a good thing!

Update: Scratch that, the sync’s slightly broken. Facebook matched a James to a Richard, and a Patrick to a Dwight I don’t know. And that replacing–profile–pics issue… So in the interest of keeping my address book clean, I’ve disabled it. It did find someone in my contacts that wasn’t on my Facebook friends list, so it’s not all bad. I’m quite disappointed that Facebook botched this, but still: iPhone OS 4, please have some sort of Synergy thing. And in the meantime: please, everybody start using Facebook as your phone book instead of going round begging people for numbers.