TechCrunch: Facebook’s iPad app and Project Spartan “about to launch”

Following-up on a Mashable story that Facebook will launch its long-awaited iPad app at Apple’s ‘Let’s talk iPhone’ media event next Tuesday, TechCrunch has just reported that Facebook’s iPad app is “about to launch”. It’s been ready to go for a while, writes author MG Siegler, and that goes for Project Spartan, too, an HTML5 web app store for Facebook apps. The Facebook for iPad app and Project Spartan are now “joined at the hip”, Siegler writes, noting “one will not launch without the other” (and Apple is cool with that).

Facebook’s iPad app is about to launch. That too has been ready to go for a while now, but it has been held up by some internal back-and-forth between Apple and Facebook. And Project Spartan has been waiting on that iPad app. […] Earlier this week, Mashable reported that Facebook’s iPad app would launch at Apple’s iPhone event this coming Tuesday. For what it’s worth, we’ve heard Facebook is actually planning to launch the iPad app at their own iPad/Spartan event on Monday. But they’re still discussing all of this with Apple. And Apple has been well known to change things at the last second. It is possible that they want Facebook to launch this on stage at their event to showcase some of the new HTML5 capabilities of iOS 5 (which will also be formally unveiled at the event).

Apple is understood to have partnered with Facebook on Project Spartan and the social networking giant is said to tap tens of millions of iPhone users to get the word out.

This latest report arrives just as we’ve learned that a Facebook engineer quit for Google, frustrated the iPad app he’s been working on has not seen the light of day. Facebook last week issued its most ambitious upgrade yet, which includes Timeline, a controversial new Facebook profile, and richer integration with third-party apps such as Spotify, a popular music streaming service that now exclusively relies on Facebook login credentials to sign up new users.