In the first half of 2013, Facebook has made a number of moves to improve its platform for entertainment and lifestyle applications.

New Timeline sections give users a place to save and display their favorite books, movies, TV shows and music. Developers can use new common Open Graph actions like “want to watch” and “want to read.” Users can share what they’re listening to, eating, feeling and more through structured status updates. Graph Search lets them find content and recommendations through friends and others. And a deal with Rovi gives Facebook a detailed database of information about movies, TV shows and celebrities

We spoke to Facebook Manager, Strategic Partnerships Ime Archibong about the new opportunities for entertainment apps on the platform, Facebook’s expanding role in content discovery, and how Open Graph can represent our offline activities and memories. The following is an edited transcript from that interview.

Inside Facebook: So it seems like a good time to talk to you now with the the new Timeline sections, News Feed and Graph Search all launched. Let’s start by talking about the state of Facebook’s entertainment platform.

Ime Archibong: I’m really excited about the suite of assets that are available for apps right now, in the entertainment space particularly and in the music space, which is one of the things I’m most excited about. You have things that are great for users. Take sections in the Timeline redesign that came out. Users now have a home for where their music consumption goes, and I’m pretty excited about that.

News Feed continues to be an important piece of distribution property for apps. With the redesign and the prominence of the music section coming out, that’s another huge asset. Graph Search. I think we’re still a ways away from where we’re going to go with Graph Search, but there’s no mystery that Open Graph actions will be showing up in Graph Search at some point, and that’s going to be a good source of traffic for these entertainment apps.

And I like what we’re doing in mobile right now. The new pages redesign is slick, it’s user-centric. If you think of that as a music artist’s home base in the Facebook ecosystem, and as we make it more engaging for users, it’s a good piece of real estate for artists themselves. I look at all these assets starting to stack up and how they come together and make us a meaningful distribution platform for these apps.

What were some of the observations and insights since the start of Open Graph apps and Timeline that that led to these changes like the new About page sections?

One of hypotheses we had when we started with apps like Spotify for instance was that people want to share and publish back what they’re listening to in a way that will round out their identity. We had a decent home for it with profile and aggregations that were showing on Timeline, but now we have a great home for it, and we’re really honoring that content. Someone can dig down deep and see what’s trending with you right now, what you’ve been listening to a lot, or get a good snapshot of what historically is important to you. That just feels right to me.

I moved a few weeks ago, and I was trying to downsize so I took all my books, all my CDs, all my DVDs and I literally went to my Timeline section and put in “Catcher in the Rye,” “Heart of Darkness” and so on. And then I put these things in a box to give to goodwill.

There’s always been this conversation about how as things move toward digital we lose this attachment and ownership of content. But I think we fill a pretty big void there. This (Timeline sections feature) shows how I’m emotionally attached to this Mary J. Blige CD or this Jay-Z CD without me having to take it every place I go in some form factor I don’t even listen to anymore. So it’s just observations like that that influence product and design and made us do some very interesting and compelling things for users.

For the distribution channels like News Feed and music feed, and why that became more prominent is because historically Facebook has been a hub for where people talk and have conversations around music. Music is inherently social and we just got to be sure it’s a compelling product for people to discover stuff and for artists who can get their stuff out there. That music feed is fantastic and I’m excited to see how we continue to evolve it.

The music feed is definitely one of the most compelling of the feeds. It always has been really advanced in terms of showing the power of Facebook’s data for recommendations and discovery. The key is, though, can you get that in front of people and will they click over to it? It definitely has more prominence than before, but it’s existed for a long time without people knowing about it.

One of the things I’m excited about is mobile and the prominence (the music feed) can have at the top there. Half a billion people access Facebook through the mobile application and that is what’s going to be in front of people. Making sure that we get the stories right and hit discovery in this environment is exciting.

So that addresses music, but what are the most interesting opportunities for other entertainment apps and platforms?

Going back to sections, I think things like books and movies are more tied to your identity than music in some sense. The fact that you consumed something like a book or a movie, the time investment that you put in there, is more than you do with a song. So the sections are important for those two media types. It’s like the bookshelf I had in my apartment for years.

How does your team measure success and judge where you are since f8 and the launch of Open Graph apps?

I would say we’ve been successful and we continue to want to do more and more work to take it to the next level clearly, but I think what continues to get us excited is being the No. 1 source of traffic for apps, whether that’s on the desktop or increasingly more mobile. We’re happy that a bunch of people are out there trying to solve the problem, but going back to the point of the different unique assets that we have, we think we have a unique opportunity to be the major source of traffic for these music apps or video apps or book apps. So that’s the ultimate goal and what gets us super excited to come to the office everyday.

What would you say that you try to instill to those platform partners as far as how they should be building for Facebook and what you can offer them back?

There’s a couple different pillars. One of the things for a lot of these partners for a number of years has been the identity piece. There are a lot of people (before Facebook) that didn’t think about what a media consumption product that knew who the consumer was could be. You have their name, where they’re from, who some of their friends are. And when you can go and build a product with that rich social information, it changes the bounds of what you can do as a designer, a user experience person, a product person. Then, there’s no lie we’ve been a great source of distribution. I think a lot of the smaller partners and apps that we worked with in this media space have seen great success.

What types of companies or experiences do really well? Is it those new experiences or the existing players integrating Facebook into what they have already?

It goes both ways. One of the models we had for our team was ‘We want to make social companies big and big companies social.’ The folks that have done really well are the ones that have leaned in and bought into the vision and understand that we move at the fastest pace of any platform or technology company that touches so many people and developers. Folks that can move really fast with us know that at the end of the day every meaningful metric to them, what they’re trying to get out of the integration, is going to be up and to the right.

We’ve seen it play out with something like Songza, really small team, leans in, wants to be along for the fantastic ride, willing to pivot and move really quickly with Facebook and take advantage of the stuff that we launch. And we see it with big companies like Clear Channel with iHeartRadio (which it owns). Massive, massive old school radio technology company and they sat down with us two years ago and said ‘yeah this is a mission, something we want to do.’ And iHeartRadio has seen tremendous success on the Open Graph and continues to grow and do well.

What are the types of companies that should be developing for Facebook and building into the Open Graph that aren’t yet? Is there a theme to the type of companies that aren’t but should be?

I would say, if you are a company that is building a product that is inherently social offline, that looking into the Open Graph and the hooks of the platform is where the opportunity is. We saw that with the fitness app ecosystem that sprouted up recently.

So, I’m not really a runner. I’m more of a team sports person, but all of a sudden I’m trying out this Nike fitness app and my friends are cheering me on as I run and it’s like ‘ooh ok, people are actually paying attention.’ People talk about running marathons and they run faster or it’s more enjoyable because you have the crowd there cheering and giving you support. The fact that I can now do that with just my phone, my earbuds and my Facebook friends? That my mom can cheer me on from North Carolina and my aunt can cheer me on from Kenya? That’s fantastic and great and turned me into a runner. Whether it’s digitally or a person giving me a thumbs up as I’m running by, that starts to change things. I think that was the most exciting thing for me, seeing something offline change as a result of the online integration that a company chose to do with Facebook because it is inherently social.

I think if you’re an app where you see an offline behavior that can be changed, enhanced or supported by doing it at scale, breaking down geo-boundaries, that’s where your opportunity is to plug into the Open Graph.

Yeah, I’m still waiting for a really good social book club app that takes advantage of the ability to make asynchronous experiences feel synchronous, so where I can see where a friend is in a book, leave notes for them, see what they say about something.

That’s exactly it. That’s an offline experience, that book club that people love to have. That’s exactly those folks that should be leaning into the platform.

So we’ve talked about Facebook’s role for app discovery and these new feeds and Timeline and Graph Search. There have always been opportunities for people to serendipitously discover things in News Feed, but now it seems like there are more ways for people to purposely discover content. To what degree do you guys want to be that source for serendipitous discovery versus — or together with — that intentional discovery?

The launch of Graph Search launched us into that foray where someone can come do the pull model of discovery. I know exactly what I’m looking for, I can now go type it into my search and find it. Historically in Facebook we hadn’t quite put that into the forefront or made it a great user experience, but we did the push model really really well. We’re going to continue to do that well. I continue to be excited about how good we will get at that, especially when it comes to these different content types like music. I keep going back to this idea, which is the different assets that we have at our disposal to make sure and knock that push discovery to an experience that’s really exciting for users. But yeah, our role is going to be interesting to see how it plays out. The push is going to be big for us, but as Graph Search scales out more that is going to be a good use case.

It definitely seems like Facebook is one of the most obvious companies that should be doing this for people, but then it seems like you’re in a tricky position because then what is the role of third-parties? Many of these apps start out or were created for that same sort of discovery purpose. I think of Rotten Tomatoes bringing in your friends and letting you share what you want to watch and helping people discover movies. How do you see the role of these third-parties in push and pull discovery and how does that balance with what you guys are trying to do?

You’d have to talk to each of these companies to figure out strategically what’s most important to them. Let’s default back to music again. I think if you talk to some companies, they’ll tell you that the consumption experience is the most important thing to them. They want to be where people go when they either download music or are streaming music. And once that happens, they’re happy. As a result of that philosophy, wherever the music discovery happens, whether it’s inside of the app or Facebook or Twitter or Tumblr, they don’t care as long as they’re driving that consumption experience. And then there’s going to be folks that understand and really like the discovery aspect. They’re building follow graphs and want to do the pull-push model for music or video or whatever it may be.

I think the role we play with the first bucket is clear: we want to make sure we’re a major source of traffic for those folks and we’re driving as many eyeballs to apps, websites, wherever that consumption experience can happen. For these other folks, they can use Facebook Login, they can get identity and friends and figure out how to use those things on their side for discovery. Most recently, we’ve opened up ‘want to watch,’ ‘want to listen,’ ‘want to read’ as an API that a Goodreads, a Netflix or a Spotify can go and hit so that when you log in as a brand new user and you’ve already told Facebook you want to read or watch or listen to these things, boom, here they are. So I think we play a role in both worlds, and it’s going to be a case by case thing depending on whether they’re focused on consumption only or discovery and consumption.

What do you find are the biggest barriers for companies to decide to go ahead and build on the Open Graph and create these experiences? For the people who aren’t, why aren’t they?

Sometimes it just boils down to engineering resources. At the end of the day, they’re making prioritizations and judgment calls. I won’t speculate what one company is deciding versus another, but a lot of times it comes down to prioritization and have they have to go do business and they know what they need to focus on. We talk to a lot of these folks and we have great relationships with all of them. How they integrate Facebook, whether it’s in a lightweight way or a very deep way with the Open Graph, there’s just a spectrum of options that they’re always weighing and considering versus the priorities they have on their side.

But what about those companies that aren’t even started or wouldn’t even come up with these ideas on their own? Are you guys going to companies and saying, ‘hey, what if you did this?’ Like, I’d want to go to AMC and tell them to hook in Open Graph with their membership card program to share what movies people are going to see. Do you guys go out and do those types of things?

We love to brainstorm.

So when  you come to companies with pie-in-the-sky ideas and give them ways they could be like Nike, too, how do they respond?

They’re typically well received. My team focuses on non-game partnerships so we can go and have conversations with companies like Delta. Big, big, traditional company. When you go in, you don’t know what to expect. We could paint them the craziest social vision right now and they’re either going to be way over here (not getting it) or they’re going to kinda get it, or we sit down and we’re pleasantly surprised. Delta has a new mobile app and iPad app that has Facebook integration and login. They’ve been super progressive about how social ties into what has historically been somewhat of a transactional industry.

What does the app do with Facebook?

First and foremost it’s identity. Then they’re looking at how you can leverage friends and social connections as your’e going from one destination to the other. They have an in-flight app that shows you the map of the ground of where you are at any given moment on the plane and shows you where your friends are. So you have conversations like that which are pleasantly surprising.

You brought up the idea of travel, and that’s a big area for apps. For Facebook, it sort of went from games to now we’re really in this entertainment, fitness, lifestyle phase, which travel fits into. Are there sights on what the next big category might be?

For one thing, categories pop up. You know, someone could go out tomorrow and build that book club app we just talked about and before you know it, book club apps are what emerges on the platform. The developer ecosystem just forms around these different ideas and concepts, so for us we want to keep building the foundation and the tools and the infrastructure so that any offline experience or even online experience that is interested in social can go and do something meaningful for their company, for their industry and also for over a billion users.

And another thing — this is for me personally and also more broadly here inside these walls — we’re still really focused on the media space. The job’s not done there. Even sitting here in the last couple minutes we’ve talked about all the different assets that could be helping the discovery of apps. Really nailing that experience and getting that right is something we remain excited about.

Do you guys ever talk about the potential for apps that are private? So many of these apps are about sharing with friends, but how do you feel about apps that for things that people don’t necessarily want to share but they want to document or save in a structured way. Say like Weight Watchers, which is personal but might be something people want to have saved as part of their identity and milestones on Timeline. Do you ever talk to companies like that with experiences which maybe aren’t super social but are really important to people?

Identity is definitely one of the pillars of Facebook that has always been there and really emerged with the refresh and push of Timeline. That’s exactly where that space lies. We could enumerate and talk about apps for a while that might make sense, whether it’s Weight Watchers or my financial information. I could potentially see a world where we get there, but I think in order to get there we need to focus on the most social industries and app experiences that make sense so that users understand this is a place where you can save, represent, collect whatever it is that is important to you as a person.

On top of that, one of the things I’ve been most proud about with Facebook is the work that we’ve done around privacy to make sure that people are saving, publishing back, sharing to Facebook, you do have the granular controls of saying ‘I want the whole world to understand and know I love Mary J. Blige, but I only want me, myself and I to know that I love Justin Bieber.’ And maybe I want to save that because 10 years from now I want to come back and look at what kind of phase I was in there, even if it’s just for myself as a keepsake.

So, in my move recently, I pulled a cassette tape — the first cassette tape I ever had, ‘Please Hammer, Don’t Hurt Em’ MC Hammer — and I can’t play this anywhere, but I’ve been keeping it and dragging it along because it represents the first thing that I got that was musical. I remember the Christmas I got it. So I added it to my music section, and maybe it’s only me right now, but nonetheless it’s there and it’s there for me to keep.

To learn more about this topic, join us at Inside Social Apps in San Francisco June 6-7. One of our sessions is “Going Social with Entertainment and Commerce Apps.” The panel will highlight the social features that best drive engagement in these apps.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Facebook released version 2.0 of its Pages Manager app for iOS on Wednesday, making it faster and including features like photo filters and stickers from its other applications. However, it no longer includes detailed post insights such as clicks and People Talking About This, and it no longer allows page owners create offers.

Previously, page owners could get several metrics about each of their posts, but now the only per-post metric that’s available is overall reach. Tapping the number leads page owners to a screen where they can pay to promote their post. To see insights like Link clicks, engaged users or even shares, page owners now have to visit desktop.

Many page owners may see this as another way that Facebook is putting its revenue-generating Promoted Posts feature ahead of functionality for admins. For example, a recent change on desktop replaced page notifications in the admin panel with prompts to promote their posts. [Update: A Facebook spokesperson says these features will be integrated in the next version of the app.]

Another missing feature is offers. Pages Manager used to have an option to create an offer post, but that’s gone in Version 2.0. [Update: Again, Facebook says this is due back in a future release.]

A key improvement is that it’s now easier to scroll through a page’s Timeline and quickly view photos fullscreen. Facebook says it rebuilt the app for speed. It includes many of the elements from other apps, such as the photo uploading process and messaging feature. This means that page owners can now edit their photos and add filters to them, just as they can in the main Facebook app and Camera app. Page owners can also use stickers in their private messages with fans or customers, though that might not be appropriate for some businesses and organizations.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

When we we last talked to augmented reality startup Dekko, back in September of last year, the company was building a platform on which it hoped to find developers to build a new generation of applications that blend computing with the real world. And, while it still hopes to be that platform, which it’s calling a ‘real-world operating system,’ the company is focusing its efforts on creating its own applications, in an effort to attract users and developers alike.

The startup has built technology which can be used to map the real world using a mobile phone or tablet’s camera. It does that by building digital grids through 3-D mapping. Once that is done, Dekko (and other developers) can layer games and other applications on top of it. For now, its app is focused on creating a grid of small, independent spaces. But there’s the potential for it to be used to map full-scale real-world environments as well.

Dekko co-founder Matt Miesnieks likened the company’s initial platform approach to selling shovels during a gold rush. That strategy, though, wasn’t going to help create the best applications on its whole new “real-world OS,” and so the company decided to take up shovels itself and dig in to create its own apps. And so it’s building its first game — which Miesnieks says is about 90 percent done — to showcase what developers can actually DO with its platform.

In that respect, the app that it’s building is kind of like how Microsoft built Solitaire for its Windows platform, Miesnieks said. More than just providing a free game for users of the new operating system, it also trained them how to use a mouse and to familiarize themselves with the control mechanism.

Dekko has also raised a bit more funding, adding an additional $1.3 million to close out a $3.2 million round. Investors include Echo Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Venture 51, Blumberg Capital, Launch Capital, Thomvest, Eniac Ventures, and Zig Capital, as well as angels like Howard Lindzon, Erik Moore, Dan Conway, and Raymond Tonsing. The company, which is based in San Francisco, now has ten employees with expertise in augmented reality, optical tracking, 3D reconstruction and user experience design.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

So what does a high Klout score actually get you? The influence-measuring startup already offers prizes through its Klout Perks program, and there are bragging rights (unless your friends think you’re a loser for caring about your Klout score). Now Klout is asking users who are influential on a given topic to answer short, factual questions through the new Klout Experts program.

It sounds like the program won’t be rolled out to every user today, but when it is, you might Klout and be prompted to answer a question like “What is the best way to care for tulips?” or “What is the best place to take your date in the city?” You’ll have 300 characters with which to offer your answer. (Why 300? Co-founder and CEO Joe Fernandez said 140 characters isn’t always enough, but he wanted to keep the answers direct and to the point.)

Fernandez told me that Klout is working closely with Bing on this feature, so if there are relevant answers on Klout, they’ll be featured prominently when people search for a given question on Bing. Fernandez said the search engine team is also suggesting future questions that Klout could ask its users. At the same time, while Klout doesn’t have the same cozy relationship with Google, the answers should show up there, too.

For now, Fernandez said he expects most of the Klout Experts traffic to come from Bing, but you can also browse the content on the Klout site itself. The company will be highlighting recent answers from your friends. Fernandez also suggest the on-site experience will improve over time. For one thing, he said users’ various answers to a single question are currently being sorted on a single page by human editors, but Klout is working on a voting system where people can endorse the answers they like — though you can only vote if you’re influential on that topic.

Fernandez suggested that this could eventually integrate with Perks and Klout for Business — for example, businesses could start asking their own questions and offer Perks for good answers.

When he described the new feature to me, I asked if people might think he was basically turning Klout’s user base into a content farm. Fernandez countered that these answers are going to be tied to people’s real identities, and emphasized that they won’t be able to post unless they’ve got a good score.

“What we’re good at is understanding the quality of engagement,” he said, adding that Klout scores are “a really good fitness function” for ensuring that people will create high-quality, useful content.

But why is Klout getting into this business at all? Well, Fernandez argued that Klout has become “the standard” in measuring online influence, so now it can start building other applications and uses on top of that system. Klout Experts is the first example of that.

“Influence and reputation is our platform,” he said.

Nonetheless, he also acknowledged that creating the feature has been a bit of a shift, pushing Klout to hire people who have more experience on the editorial side and with user-generated content: “How do we get people from Yelp versus Google Analytics?”

The Experts program is currently focused on technology, food, music and travel. You can view some sample answers here and here and sign up for early access here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

For developers who wish to introduce payment services through their website or mobile apps, there are any number of payment processors available. Companies like Stripe offer up APIs which help developers quickly integrate payments into their applications, without having to build out non-core functionality themselves.

But what about developers who want to be able to take payments directly, like in real-life? On that front, the options are much more limited. While Square and PayPal and Intuit have done a good job of lining up small businesses to use its card reader and Register point-of-sale system, those customers are stuck using the platform provided to them. Those who wish to develop their own custom or branded solutions are out of luck when it comes to taking real-world payments.

Enter CardFlight, which is launching with an encrypted, Square-like card reader of its own, as well as an SDK and APIs that will allow developers to create apps and take “card-present” payments on their mobile apps. Those apps can then securely be used to swipe cards, and have payments appear in their existing merchant accounts.

CardFlight CEO Derek Webster tells me that, despite the focus on e-commerce and mobile commerce applications, about 90 percent of credit card transactions still happen with a swipe. With that in mind, the company is hoping to make it easier for developers to build apps and for businesses to use apps with so-called card-present transactions. To do so, they need only add a few lines of code to those apps.

There’s also the CardFlight dongle, which is just like other credit-card dongles provided by Square, or PayPal, or Intuit. It’s encrypted, and safe and secure and PCI-compliant and all that.

The developer toolset is processor-agnostic, which lets developers pick from a whole bunch of existing merchant accounts. And, it’s integrated with Stripe to enable developers who use Stripe for their stored credit card payments to also accept payments from people who wanna swipe their cards.

All of that would allow a chain restaurant, for instance, to build its own applications and integrated POS systems. Or for event organizers to build (non-Eventbrite) apps for selling tickets at the door to their local venues. Or for CRM apps to enable card payments for in-person sales applications. Or other stuff like that. Really, the possibilities are kind of endless.

CardFlight is now entering into private beta, with a number of developers already ready to start using its SDK in building their apps. Wanna be one of them? Go here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

It’s a big day for Adobe today, as the company is announcing new versions of all of its Creative Suite and Edge developer tools at its Max conference in Los Angeles today. All of the Creative Suite tools like Photoshop and Illustrator will now allow users to save files directly to the Creative Cloud and access its community features, which will be powered by Behance, the company Adobe recently acquired. Creative Cloud now also allows you to sync all of your settings and fonts between multiple computers.

Indeed, this syncing capability is, in many ways, the cornerstone of this release. Users, Adobe’s Scott Morris told me last week, will be able to automatically sync their fonts, colors and settings between multiple installs, no matter whether they are on a Mac or PC. A color scheme users create in Kuler, for example, will be immediately available in Illustrator CC, too (and Kuler is getting an iPhone app, too, which can now extract color schemes from any photo you take with your phone and sync it to Creative Cloud). All of the app preferences will also be synced, including for examples Illustrator brushes and libraries.

As part of this update, Adobe is also launching a totally new version of the old installer that users previously used to install and update their applications. Now, this installer app goes far beyond just letting you download your software. It’s now the central hub for managing all things Creative Cloud. While you obviously still use it to install Adobe’s applications, it’s now also the central place for accessing and managing files in the Creative Cloud. The same is true for fonts and Adobe says it renegotiated all of its deals with the foundries that have fonts and Typekit for this and that it is adding about $20,000 worth of fonts to its library.

Besides this, the Creative Cloud application now feature easy access to the Behance community, too. Photoshop users, for example, can now publish their creations directly to Behance from within the application to get feedback from their community there. This integration, the company says, allows for “real-time inspiration and a seamless way to share your work.” As part of their Creative Cloud subscriptions, all users get 20GB of cloud storage for backup and sharing.

In addition, the Creative Cloud command center app also features a Yammer-like stream of updates from your Behance network. Adobe says the Behance community is currently 1.5 million members strong.

As Morris told me, this is just the beginning of what Adobe has in store for integrating its tools through Creative Cloud. Adobe, he said, will be adding a lot more to Creative Cloud going forward.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

When Kera launched out of Toronto last year, its goal was to “teach the world how to use software.” Alas, Kera has taught its last lesson.

In a farewell post on its blog, the company has announced that they’ll be shuttering their products in one month.

For the unfamiliar, Kera provided tools that allowed web app developers to quickly build interactive voice/text tutorials that directly integrate into their apps. With just a bit of clever JavaScript dropped in place, you could walk new users through your product step-by-step from within the product itself — this, as opposed to, say, a tutorial video.

Here’s the thing: developers are, by and large, a proud bunch. If a dev recognizes that their product is so complicated that they need to hold the user’s hand through every step of the process, they (hopefully) rethink their design rather than search out a bandaid.

Just three weeks ago, the company pivoted when they realized that “people didn’t like to be guided the way [Kera] wanted to guide them,” with over 50 percent of users immediately dismissing the tutorial overlay. In place of the tutorial overlay, they built a pre-packaged “Get Started Widget” that gave users “missions” to complete to properly learn a product. Though it only had a few weeks worth of runway, this widget didn’t seem to be gaining traction, and the company was quickly running out of money.

While the team is considering open-sourcing or selling the tech if any interested parties come along, their current plan is to just shut it down. Though they’re announcing the shutdown now, they plan to leave the servers up until May 18th to give developers time to remove it from their applications.

Meanwhile, the company’s original three founders say they’re “hard at work cooking something special.” Best of luck, guys!

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook today announced a number of changes meant to improve the experience and increase the possibilities for mobile developers building apps that integrate with the social network. This includes new Open Graph APIs, a standard mobile share dialog, faster login and a Technology Partners program to help developers find third-party solutions that suit their needs.

One of the most significant developments announced today is the Object API, which allows mobile developers to create Open Graph objects without having to host corresponding webpages. Previously, applications had to serve data into Open Graph through web endpoints, so native iOS and Android apps weren’t able to build the same types of experiences or gain the same opportunities for distribution and discovery as web-basedd apps, unless they have the resources to build a web backend. Now this won’t be necessary and mobile or web apps can use the Object API for easier object creation.

Facebook is also introducing an object privacy model to allow objects that have custom or non-public privacy settings. This is especially important for some of the user generated content that comes from mobile apps. Web-hosted objects, on the other hand, have always had to be public. To help developers manage all their objects now, Facebook created a new “object browser” interface — seen below — that aims to organize developers’ objects in a more visual and intuitive way.

Another key development announced today is the native mobile share dialog. This gives developers a standard dialog, which already includes support for location tagging, friend tagging, custom privacy settings, deep linking and more. Similar to the Like button, the share dialog can be implemented with a small amount of code across any app and it works even if users haven’t logged into the app using Facebook. For now it is available in limited beta for iOS apps, but is in development for Android, the company says.

Facebook also officially announced changes to the mobile login dialogs, which have a new cleaner design and load up to 20 percent faster. We saw Facebook testing these last week. In connection with the changes announced in December 2012, the apps permissions process now separates read and write permissions into different dialogs. This means users have the option to log into an application and receive a personalized experience using their name, friend list and other aspects of their profile, but they can reject the app’s request to publish activity on their behalf.

Another important announcement made at Facebook’s Mobile Developer Conference in New York City today was the Facebook Technology Partners program with 10 initial companies. These are Facebook-approved developers providing technical developer tools. This is similar to the Preferred Marketing Developer program, but focused on solutions for developers rather than marketers. Corona Labs, Kinvey, Thuzi, Parse, Adobe, Microsoft, Sencha, StackMob, Trigger.io and Prime31 are the initial partners, and more information about their offerings are available here. Most of what these companies provide are paid solutions, but there are often different tiers depending what a developer needs.

Finally, Facebook also released an update for the Facebook SDK for iOS, which includes support for the Object API, native Share Dialog and native Login Dialog announced today. The SDK no longer supports iOS versions earlier than 5.0.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Wildfire, the social media marketing platform owned by Google, announced Tuesday that it is shutting down its self-serve Promotion Builder product.

The company will instead offer promotions solely as part of its Social Marketing Suite for enterprise clients. Basic, Standard and Premium promotions will be retired June 30. Promotions data will be available for export up until July 31.

The Social Marketing Suite covers ad buying, page management, conversation monitoring and analytics, in addition to promotion development. Previously, anyone could visit Wildfire’s site, sign up for an account and start creating and running social promotions, such as sweepstakes, coupon offers or user-generated content contests. Now, Wildfire doesn’t offer any pricing information on its site and asks potential customers to contact the company directly.

Smaller brands and businesses could look to alternatives like Offerpop, North Social or Heyo, which give marketers a range of tools for running social promotions and creating other custom experiences across social, mobile and web properties, but without the cost and commitment of an enterprise contract.

Forrester assesses social relationship platforms

Forrester Research released a report Tuesday evaluating eight top social relationship platforms in terms of their current offering, strategy and market presence. Shoutlet received the highest score for current offering and Spredfast had the top score for strategy. Salesforce.com’s Buddy Media led in market presence.

Forrester looked at Adobe, Hearsay Social, Salesforce.com’s Buddy Media, Shoutlet, Socialwave, Spredfast, Sprinklr and Syncapse, rating each on 49 criteria. Overall, the study found no clear leaders in the space, but most were “strong performers.” Socialware and Syncapse were in the lower tier of “contenders.”

Shoutlet led the current offering category largely because of its comprehensive feature set and easy onboarding. Spredfast excelled in strategy because of its highly satisfied customer base, which found its measurement and reporting capabilities to be the strongest of all platforms.

The full report, “The Forrester Wave™: Social Relationship Platforms, Q2 2013,” is available for purchase here.

ShopIgniter updates rich media advertising platform

Social marketing and commerce company ShopIgniter this week announced an update to its Igniter platform, which helps companies create rich media posts on Facebook, as well as its entry into the paid media management space.

The combination gives brands an end-to-end solution for running interactive advertisements in the Facebook News Feed. For instance, a company could show off a new product line with a video and image gallery that link to the retailer’s website or includes an entry form for a related sweepstakes. ShopIgniter provides templates, but experiences and design are fully customizable.

Instead of hosting these experiences in page tab applications that users hardly visit, ShopIgniter presents them in-stream so users can interact with and share the posts directly from News Feed. ShopIgniter says rich media posts generate more engagement and less negative feedback than traditional posts.

ShopIgniter now has a small media buying team to manage campaigns for clients. Sr. Director of Strategy Justin Kistner, who recently joined the company after leading product at Spruce Media, says he’s bringing on more media buyers and a product team is in the works but for now the company is mostly advising clients on how to apply paid media to their rich media posts created with ShopIgniter.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Travel and expense management giant Concur is today launching an app store of its own, featuring the applications from companies it has partnered with, as well as those it has invested in through its recently announced $150 million “Perfect Trip Fund.” In the Concur App Center, as the new marketplace is called, visitors can browse through apps designed for themselves as individuals, as well as those meant for corporate use.

Despite the very business-minded focus of many of Concur’s application partners (TechCrunch’s parent company Aol, for example, forces us to use uses Concur for managing expenses), the new App Center has a very consumer-friendly look and feel. The company tells us that it now houses over 30 Concur partner apps, including the big name consumer brand TripIt, for example. It’s also currently featuring apps from Avis, CIBTvisas, and TripLingo, directly on the App Center’s homepage.

The company has also partnered with several companies across different industries to expand its App Center further today, including partnerships with compliance solution makers (Regulatory DataCorp, StayinFront CRM, borderFile), Finance / I.T. firms (ExpenseConnect, TBoxCloud, Oversight Systems, Ping Identity) and traveler services app makers (TripLingo, OAG).

To date, the Concur / Perfect Trip fund has also invested in the following companies, also now found the App Center:

• buuteeq ($10 million from Concur and Madrona)
• Cleartrip ($40 million strategic investment)
• Evature ($2 million)
• Room 77 (participated in $30 million Series C)
• Yapta ($5 million)
• RideCharge (undisclosed strategic investment)
• Nor1 (led a $9 million round)

Article courtesy of TechCrunch