Thursday, October 25, 2007

Facebook mobile platform

Today at CTIA, Facebook announced support for mobile versions of Facebook applications. Well at least kind of. I’m not entirely sure of the details yet, but it looks like app developers can tie into mobile components, like SMS messaging. Facebook uses SMS to alert me when I have received a new inbox message. This is convenient and handy. Apps can now use this, which is cool, because individual developers would have to rely on email->sms gateways or pay for a messaging service to work with all carriers. Now it seems they can piggyback on Facebook, who have the message infrastructure in place.

It also sounds like apps can have mobile versions that will work with the mobile version of the site. Note that there are two. One wap (or maybe xhtml-mp), the other for iPhone. The iPhone app is the best app out there. Although the applications aren’t supported, basic Facebook functionality works fabulously. I’ll have to take a look at the developer API a little more now and see what else can be exploited for mobile apps. The SMS gateway is enough already for the little guy. ...More

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