Facebook Launches Open Graph Mobile, Updated iOS SDK With Improved Login And Sharing

Facebook today unveiled three new products at its Mobile Developer Conference in NYC that will put the company on an even faster track to becoming a mobile-first platform.

The company announced Open Graph mobile, which takes Facebook’s social graphing product to the mobile platform for the first time. Facebook is also improving Login via mobile, and releasing a new Facebook SDK 3.5 for iOS.

Alongside unveiling the latest initiatives toward a mobile-focused Facebook, the social network also released its latest figures for mobile, which include over 680 million mobile users and the fact that over 81 percent of iOS apps and 70 percent of top 100 grossing Android apps integrate with Facebook.

In terms of Open Graph mobile, Facebook simply wants to make it easier for developers to integrate the Open Graph into their mobile apps, a feat that has proved difficult in the past. But with a new Object API, Facebook is cutting out the web server.

“With the Object API, you can directly create Open Graph objects and no longer need to host webpages with Open Graph tags. This API is available for both mobile and web apps,” reads the press release. Facebook has also released an Object Browser, which is a visual interface that lets developers interact with their published object data. Alongside the Object Browser, you’ll also notice that Facebook has introduced a new object privacy model that improves sharing of user generated content within native apps.

Past that, the company also released native Share Dialog, a tool that lets users share experiences from native mobile apps without needing to log in to Facebook first. It also has built-in support for publishing Open Graph actions, so it makes sharing within developers’ apps much better “with just one line of code.”

Why is this important? Two things really.

For one, more apps using Open Graph lets Facebook pull more content into the news feed that it can monetize with ads showing alongside it. Plus, Facebook will receive more structured data about user activities, which again, brings us back around to targeting ads.

Where log-in is concerned, Facebook is launching a faster login dialog (20 percent faster, to be exact) that gives users more control over their permissions and privacy. Facebook realized a few months ago that their newest permission model on the FB platform was seeing a 5 percent increase in mobile conversions, and so they decided to bring that feature to their developers as well. Starting today, the new login dialog will automatically be applied to mobile and non-game web apps with no change required to the code.

Last, but certainly not least, Facebook is launching the Facebook Technology Partners program to help developers leverage these new products across all the potential platforms out there. According to the release, “these partners offer technical solutions that include SDKs, plugins, tools and services to help developers build great social apps.”

Here’s the initial list of partners:

  • C# SDK for Windows 8 by Microsoft
  • Corona SDK by Corona Labs
  • Kinvey
  • Node.js by Thuzi
  • Parse SDK by Parse
  • PhoneGap by Adobe
  • Sencha Touch by Sencha
  • StackMob SDK by StackMob
  • Trigger.io SDK by Trigger.io
  • Unity Social Networking Plugin by Prime31
  • WinJS by Thuzi

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