Facebook is Moving into Mobile

Facebook is going mobile.

As if Facebook didn’t already have a controlling lead over most other social media platforms, the social media giant has declared its new priority: dominating the mobile field.

At the F8 Facebook Developer’s Conference in San Fransisco, CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other Facebook officials commented on the decision on Wednesday, as the company plans to improve platform stability and allow users more control with their data in a line of improvements catered to mobile apps integrated with Facebook services.

The company is also looking for software developers to help expand its growing presence on mobile devices and will offer tools and services across multiple platforms to assist in building and monetizing applications .

Facebook also released API versioning, ensuring that apps connected to Facebook will function through new, guaranteed stability: even if Facebook changes their core APIs, they will support the service for at least two years. On top of this support, there is also a service-level agreement that requires Facebook to fix all major issues in a 48-hour window. Media companies will also receive new public content APIs to assist in leveraging Facebook content and data.

Zuckerberg also commented on the separate mobile platforms of Microsoft, Apple, and Google; Facebook, he said, aims to provide the tools to bridge these platforms.

In regards to the increase of user control over data, there will be a new Message Dialog capability for both iOS and Android platforms, allowing content sharing from apps on Facebook Messenger. The Send to Mobile feature will also allow users to forward an app to their mobile device after visiting the website, but only if the user has logged in via Facebook.

The company also contains a program called FbStart that will issue resources and tools to mobile startups, allowing them to successfully connect to the social media platform.

"It's clear that Facebook's putting a lot of emphasis on mobile, and they want to own the mobile app ecosystem, the mobile ad ecosystem, which is why they're trying to get every mobile developer to serve their ads," said Rich Sutton, CTO at Nexgate, which offers a compliance and security application that works with Facebook. "The primary thing that we want is the stability in the APIs. We have a very deep API integration. We make a lot of calls into the API, and I'm very happy that Facebook is transitioning from a company that lets it fly to a company that understands that they're becoming an important layer of substrate on the Internet."

Source: https://www.infoworld.com/t/application-development/facebooks-new-priority-mobile-dominance-241678?page=0,0