Facebook has made a new set of announcements related to mobile phones at its Mobile Developer’s Conference held in New York today. It has announced that it will be releasing the Open Graph platform for mobile phones. This is a big
change for the mobile ecosystem where Open Graph Mobile can work wonders and drastically improve the way in which apps integrate with Facebook thus providing much easier access to social graph information. Besides this announcement, the social networking giant also released a newer version of its Facebook SDK 3.5 for iOS and improved upon its Facebook Login for mobiles. The new Object API makes it much easier for mobile developers to create Open Graph objects on mobile devices without needing a web server. There is also a new “Native Share Dialog” which is currently available for iOS apps as a limited beta which allows publishing of Open Graph actions from a mobile device. While all these updates are already on the way for iOS devices, more updates for Android devices are also in the works as mentioned by Douglas Purdy on the Facebook developer’s blog post. Apart from these technical updates to its platform, Facebook also announced a new Technical Partner program which will include companies who provide products like Sencha Touch, C# SDK, Node.js, Corona SDK etc. Facebook is working towards making mobile app developers integrate more and more into its Social platform on the mobile web too. Its products like Sign in with Facebook, Facebook Comments, Like and Share buttons have already penetrated deep into the traditional websites which heavily use these plugins to provide more social features to their experience. According to Douglas Purdy, “More than 81% of top 100 grossing iOS apps and 70% of top 100 grossing Android apps integrate with Facebook. With the new tools we’re unveiling today, we’re excited to see even more high quality mobile apps integrate with Facebook to engage with our 680+ million mobile users.”
