New Facebook for webOS Beta brings notifications at last

The new Facebook for webOS application that launched earlier this month brought a massive overhaul and a laundry list of needed improvements, but it lacked one thing that users have been clamoring for since the beginning: notifications.

webOS’ notifications system is one of its greatest strengths, allowing alerts to pop up on screen in a way that is unobtrusive while still allowing the user to quickly jump to the relevant screen if desired. An alert-heavy application like Facebook going sans-notifications definitely dampened the experience a bit.

Well, Facebook notifications are coming. In fact, they’re already here, if you’re willing to dabble with Beta software.

Palm has just released a beta version of Facebook v1.1.4 to their developer community, with notification support being the flagship feature. They also took the opportunity to patch up a few bugs that have sprung up since the launch of the new app, and to tack on a few new features like keyboard shortcuts and making the news feed automatically refresh when you re-open the Facebook card.

Not a developer? Don’t sweat it. Though you won’t find this in the official App Catalog just yet, Palm doesn’t seem too picky about who they’re sending it to from the beta download page.