Developing Facebook Enabled Apps for the iPad
Date: Tue, 10/11/2011 - 6:48pm
Yesterday, Facebook released it's much anticipated iPad app which has been rumored to have been under development for over a year. It mimics the web application on the iPad, but there are some very cool additions for mobile developers that can be leveraged immediately.
1. iOS and Android applications - If you have already developed a mobile application the latest SDK from Facebook allows for easy inclusion of single sign-on (SSO) using Facebook connect. Using this SSO applications to customize their apps to the user's tastes and past history on Facebook, plus it opens the door to show off your application to the Facebook audience when you start using some of the APIs.
2. The Facebook Java based SDK will now support web and mobile web applications so you don't need to spend more resource hours on another build and you will be able to get your application in front of more people who are increasingly using their mobiles and tablets to access Facebook.
3. Timeline, Ticker and News Feed - By including Facebook SSO you can also include various APIs that will allow your application to post to Facebook. For example if a user is playing a game, that action will be included in the ticker on the right hand corner of Facebook, posted to a user's Timeline that tracks their daily interactions with Facebook and anything connected to Facebook and allow people to post information to News Feeds and other people's walls. This allows app developers to use Facebook to increase the likelihood their app will go viral.
4. Bookmarks - Since Facebook is one of the most utilized applications with 350 million people logging in every day, it's very cool that they have included something called Bookmarks, a new cross-platform way to share and use your favorites applications. These bookmarks show the latest web or native apps the user has interacted with using Facebook connect. If you are using Facebook mobile and see your friend has been playing the web-based version of FarmVille, selecting the FarmVille application from their Bookmarks will either open your native mobile version of FarmVille or your Facebook version of the game. By increasing user interactions and app-centric posts Facebook can now diffuse the growth of an application across multiple platforms.
5. Payments - Mobile web applications and Android applications can use Facebook credits to sell content ranging from content subscriptions like a daily newspaper subscriptions to level packs within games. The glaring omission is iPhone and iPad that will not include Facebook payments within their platforms.
Some very cool additions from Facebook that allows developers to increase the visibility of their applications and potentially get paid for them. We are really excited here at Studio to start including some of these new features in our work.
