Since launching its first native iPhone app in 2008, Facebook has taken an all-in-one approach to building mobile apps with most major features of the site accessible in a single application.

But it looks like that may be about to change with leaked photos of a forthcoming photo-sharing app obtained by TechCrunch, which would push the social network into a competitive, but nascent field of apps like Instagram, PicPlz, Path and Color.

Designing apps around a feature or single behavior represents a sea change in thinking for the company. It’s a recognition that making users do two clicks into the app to access messages, chat or photos introduces too much friction and that apps built around a pared-down set of actions done in 30 seconds or less perform the best. This contrasts with what the company has done in the last few years in trying to put as much of the website’s functionality into its mobile apps as possible.

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Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

The battle for e-book supremacy is about to get more interesting. This morning, the Wall Street Journal reported that Google is planning to launch its own digital book store by early summer. The new product will be called Google Editions. In addition to offering what sounds like a standard booksearch/storefront, Google also plans to allow independent book vendors to sell Google Editions from their own websites.

The WSJ article notes that Google’s goal is to distinguish itself from other digital book vendors “by allowing users to access books from a broad range of websites using a broad array of devices”. This contrasts with Apple’s iBooks, which are only available through the iPad and the iPhone. Amazon’s Kindle is more flexible than that (it offers desktop software, and has built applications for both the iPhone and iPad in addition to its own hardware Kindle device). But it sounds like Google’s solution will out-open both of these, allowing consumers to access their content from an array of devices that presumably won’t need dedicated native applications.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch