Facebook Brings Open Graph to Mobile
Certainly big news for developers who’ve been trying to leverage the feature in the past to no avail. Today at Facebook’s Mobile Dev Con in NYC they’ve announced their “next evolution of Facebook Platform for mobile”. Just like when Facebook transitioned from HTML5 to Native, the company is making a similar transition with the Facebook Platform for Mobile.
With its already massive reach on mobile, Facebook stated: more than 81% of the top 100 grossing iOS apps and more than 70% of the top 100 grossing Android apps integrate with Facebook. But they don’t want to just stop there, the company wants to push even better apps to hundreds of millions of mobile users. To do so, Facebook is announcing new tools and features to make it easier for developers to integrate into the Facebook Platform for Mobile to maximize engagement, experience, and discoverablity.
Some of these changes have been outlined on Facebook’s blog by Director of Product Douglas Purdy.
Open Graph
Facebook is bringing its Open Graph to mobile. While possible in the past, it wasn’t easy for developers to integrate with Open Graph without going through a lot of hurdles. Facebook’s breakthrough allows them to create a new Object API that lets developers directly create Open Graph objects without having to host a webpage with Open Graph tags. This pretty significant because it allows mobile-first developers to integrate content without having to maintain a separate page and web server. This new Object API will work both on mobile and with web apps. Facebook is also rolling out an Object Browser, which is essentially, a visual interface to show developers what object data they’ll be publishing.
You can find out more about the Object API here.
Native Share Dialog
Additionally, Facebook is releasing a new native Share Dialog to improve the way user’s share experiences from native mobile apps. This means users can potentially share activities without having to be logged into facebook first.
I.E.
If you’re in a news app and want to share an article to your timeline, you can do that pain-free.
The implementation is similar to how a developer would add a Like button(one line of code). The native Share Dialog is available in limited beta for iOS as of yesterday and it will be coming to Android soon.
The company is also bringing improved mobile login dialogs to make loads faster and more appealing. All mobile and non-game web apps will be migrated to the new dialogs automatically.
New SDK 3.5 for iOS
A big update to the Facebook SDK for iOS is also on its way. One that would add support for the new Object API, native Share Dialogs and native Login Dialogs. The iOS Dev Center has been updated to help developers get the most up-to-date resources for integrating Facebook into their apps.
Kevin is an Online and Mobile Marketing Strategist who has worked with companies of all sizes over the last 6 years. You can follow Kevin on any of the social platforms below.
