Oh Socialscope, what a love-hate relationship we BlackBerry users have with you.

Socialscope has been in private beta for what seems like forever. The problem is once you manage to actually get in to the beta, you may or may not actually receive updates to the application before you move into a nursing home. How the team at Socialscope decides which users do and do not receive updates is unclear, but it appears that the majority of people don’t receive the updates right away.

For whatever reason, I have been one of the fortunate few to receive updates in what appears to be (based on other Twitter users’ feedback) the earliest timeframe possible.

Thursday night I was prompted to update the Socialscope application from 0.9.5.88 to 0.9.5.98. I assumed that the update would just be some much-needed bug fixes as the last couple updates have been, but luckily, there were some significant new features introduced.

As you may know Socialscope isn’t just a great Twitter client for BlackBerry, but it also does an excellent job integrating Facebook, Flickr, and even Foursquare. In this update Facebook implementation got a huge update bringing in-app profile viewing and full photo album viewing. Also, more items are being pulled into the Facebook feed, instead of just statuses and wall posts, some 3rd-party application information is included. This isn’t necessarily a good thing however, unless of course you want to know who your friend’s “lover of the day” is. Still, the ability to easily view people’s profiles without being redirected to Facebook’s mobile site is a welcome addition, and photo album viewing rivals that of the native Facebook for BlackBerry application (which I don’t use thanks to Socialscope).

The new version also brings a slightly refreshed “tweet view” with refreshed fonts and a cleaned up layout. The functionality is the same but it looks better and displays information more clearly. New-style retweets are also finally supported in this build, allowing users to properly view and send retweets via “retweet” and “comment” options. Under the hood, this new version runs much faster and loads avatars, tweets, and any photos included quicker and more reliably. Many times in previous versions photos wouldn’t load until I individually selected tweets, even then they would appear slower than they should. Geotagging has also become much more reliable, finding my location more quickly and more accurately, making Foursquare much more useable.

All in all this was an unexpectedly feature-filled update. While it’s hard to predict Socialscope’s direction with the application (seeing how it’s been in beta for so long) it’s nice to see they are still bringing new feature to at least some users.

If you aren’t a Socialscope user yet go ahead and try your hand at getting an invite into the beta, and if you already use the application, let us know if you’ve seen an update lately and what version you’re running.