Get push notifications from Facebook on your iPhone with TextFree.

The current version of the Facebook iPhone app is pretty basic in terms of features and functionality. There is an upgrade Facebook for iPhone 3.0 is coming up soon that has quite a lot of feature sets but missing the Push Notifications that would allow you to receive message notifications on your iPhone when someone writes on your Facebook Wall or some significant activity happened on your Facebook account. So, you might think that until a later update comes out you are stuck with receiving Facebook updates on your regular email.

Well, not really! If you are willing tweak things then there is a simple workaround to get your Facebook updates directly onto your iPhone leveraging a messaging application, TextFree.

TextFree (iTunes direct link) is a simple messaging app that allows you to send and receive text messages using your 3G network than your cellular network. So you don’t have to enroll for those money-sucking SMS plans of AT&T even though it would cost next to nothing for them to deal with these SMS messages.

Let’s see how we can leverage Textfree app to receive Facebook notifications on our iPhone without spending a dime (if you go the Lite version of Textfree).

Start by downloading Textfree from AppStore. There are 2 versions available, one is a paid version (for $5.99) that has unlimited text capability with no advertisements and the free version that has a message ceil of 15 per day with advertisements shown in between. Choose the one that’s right for you, it doesn’t matter which version you use.

Once installed, launch Textfree on your iPhone and create an account with Textfree. Keep in mind that the username you end up with Textfree is your email as well (like username@textfree.us) where you would receive Facebook updates. So choose any name that you prefer.

Once your name is available and you create your account you can go to Textfree’s Options page to give your phone number to receive messages on your phone number (to me that deceits the purpose anyway).

Keep your iPhone aside and use your computer to get to your Facebook profile. Click on the “Settings” link at the top right side of the page. Make sure you are on the “Settings” tab of the page and then click on the “change” link under “Email“.

Facebook allows you to add a new email to your account. Make sure to type-in the @textfree.us email account that you’ve just created with Textfree and hit the “Add New Email” button.

Facebook might ask you to confirm the change by asking for your password. Key-in your Facebook password and hit “Confirm“.

Facebook will send a message to the @textfree.us account that you’ve just made primary. If you are reading the message on your iPhone things might take a turn as the link on that message is not a hot link (which means, you won’t be able to click on it) and you won’t be able to copy as well. Weird! Don’t worry, go ahead and write it down and key-in that URL on to your browser on your computer.

You’ll be taken to a page where you should be able to change the “Contact Email” to the @textfree.us account that you’ve just added to Facebook. Hit the “Change Contact Email” button to confirm the change. Facebook might ask you to enter the password again.

Once you make the change you should be able to see that your primary email is your @textfree.us email. What that tells you is that now you are all set to receive notifications on your iPhone using the Textfree email account. In other words, Facebook will send updates to your @textfree.us email account and Textfree will take care of sending a message alert to your iPhone to notify you of the message.

Pretty cool! Isn’t it? Keep in mind that this could be an easy workaround to receive Facebook updates on your iPhone until Facebook implements this functionality on its own app.

If you have any questions or comments regarding this please let us know in comments.

Technorati Tags:
iPhone, iPhone How To, iPhone OS 3.0, iPhone Tips, iPhone Tricks, Facebook