After a wait that seemed to span an eternity, we finally saw the green light yesterday for Facebook 3.0.

Having nearly jumped out of my seat last night after learning the news, I quickly found my excitement tempered by an app that didn’t seem to work at first attempt.

And then I learned I wasn’t alone.

One friend tells me he can’t load his friends list. Another says the app closes every time she loads her Facebook wall.

My problems, meanwhile, are a hybrid of the two – a situation that even a trusty reboot and restore would not resolve.

And after seeing several message boards I frequent light up with similar complaints, I phoned Apple to see if I could get any info. After two attempts, the advice I was given finally worked:

- Delete Facebook app from your iPhone
- Download app from iTunes
- Select app and sync to iPhone
- Reboot iPhone without opening app first

The update for Facebook is no small production, as the app is now closer to the desktop experience than ever before. And any upgrade of this magnitude almost can’t be expected to launch without a few hitches or bugs along the way. At this time at least I am unaware of any rash of phone crashes and data loss that would resemble an utter Facebook 3.0 catastrophe.

If anything, perhaps the excitement surrounding the upgrade is such that users like myself are finding their frustration compounded only by their own impatience to dive right into an app that has teased our appetite for far too long.