During a panel at the Inside Social Apps conference, Bret Taylor, chief technology officer of Facebook, made it pretty clear that the platform team will be focused on mobile for much of 2011.
He said that the past year or so has been focused on improving the overall user experience on Facebook, with the company effectively cutting down 95 percent of application spam. Now, with an eye toward the future, the company is expanding the platform team in an effort to enable developers to more easily implement Facebook within their mobile applications.
The company is also hoping that social media helps impact other industries in the same way it has for games. While practically everyone at the Inside Social Apps conference appeared to be focused on gaming, Facebook is working to convince other industries that implementing Facebook will result in the same massive impact that games have experienced.
So far, Facebook is just in the beginning phase of pushing forward with mobile efforts. While the company has increased distribution across numerous mobile devices, the company has only begun to innovate in ways that help developers. Most significant for developers so far has been the new iOS and Android-capable single sign-on solution.
Bret revealed that the single sign-on solution had increased signups for Flixster by 300 percent following the implementation of their single sign-on. The greatest takeaway was that mobile is still extremely early despite the massive strides Apple and Google have made in making it easier to build for mobile. Bret emphasized how Facebook has become committed to HTML5 and will continue to focus on the mobile web platform moving forward.
While still early, in 2011 we will see a broad push toward mobile from Facebook and we can only expect the social-mobile app space to heat up as a result.
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