Facebook Announces Mobile Developer Platform
October 24, 2007
According to VentureBeat, Facebook announced the Facebook Platform for Mobile today at CTIA Wireless. The new platform will enable third party developers to extend their existing applications to be used by mobile devices.
Facebook Platform for Mobile will allow users to opt-in to sending and receiving application-based text messages, as well as allowing users to interact directly with applications through Facebook’s mobile site.
In addition to the Facebook Platform for Mobile announcement, Facebook and Research In Motion (RIM) announced the launch of Facebook for BlackBerry. This Facebook application will allow Blackberry owners to take full advantage of their Smartphone’s push-based system architecture.
With the potential of so many new applications being within reach of mobile device owners in the very near future, it will be interesting to see how large of a mobile audience Facebook captures with this move.
Update: Facebook has released the official announcement on their blog. The specific changes affecting developers are outlined as follows.
Profile and Canvas
First, with a new FBML tag (fb:mobile) you will be able to integrate your applications into the mobile XHTML version of Facebook (http://m.facebook.com) on profile and canvas pages. Any content you include in this new tag will be rendered exclusively on the mobile site.SMS
Second, we are opening methods which enable you to access our SMS platform. This will enable you to directly interact with Facebook users through SMS. Users will also be able to interact with each other through your application by SMS as well.
In order to get a first look at and make use of these new integration points, Facebook has introduced the Blackberry application as a resource for the client side. Additionally, to take advantage of full-featured SMS and XHTML integration, the Causes application is available.
Facebook has created an official page in the developers wiki on the topic of Facebook Platform for Mobile, which can be used as a starting point.
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