At the Facebook Home unveiling, Mark Zuckerberg said that people are increasingly consuming content on mobile. It’s true for Facebook as is it true for just about everything else. That’s why Facebook needs to step up its mobile game, and it did just that today.
At its Mobile Developer Conference in New York City, Facebook announced that Open Graph is coming to mobile in a big way. The first step is making sure everybody can integrate Open Graph into their mobile apps without having to deal with the complexity of the Graph API. The answer is the Object API – tools that let developers “directly create Open Graph objects” while no longer needing “to host webpages with Open Graph tags.” The new API is available to both mobile and Web apps so that nobody is left out.
To make things even easier, Facebook is also introducing the Object Browser. It’s a “simple visual interface that helps you easily interact with the object data you publish.” For more on the Object API and the Object Browser, check out Facebook’s documentation.
One of the core tenets of Facebook is sharing, and the social network is making it even easier on mobile with the Native Share Dialog. This particular tool allows people to share in-app actions without having to open or log into the Facebook app. It’s also incredibly easy to implement as it only requires a single line of code. The Native Share Dialog is available starting today in a limited beta on iOS with Android support coming soon. Check out Facebook’s documentation for more info.
Users can look forward to an even friendlier Facebook mobile login experience as well as the social network is rolling out a number of enhancements to make things faster and more secure. The first is that Facebook has rebuilt its Login Dialog on mobile and Web to make it 20 percent faster. All Login Dialogs on mobile and non-game Web apps will be automatically upgraded to the new dialog today, but mobile apps can get even faster dialogs in the latest iOS and Android SDKs. If you want more info on Login Dialogs, check out Facebook’s documentation.
As for security, Facebook has split Facebook permissions in mobile apps into two separate dialogs. The first is a mandatory dialog that asks users to share their Facebook data with the app. The second asks users if the app can post content to their Facebook wall on their behalf. In the second dialog, users can either agree, skip the step or customize which people the app can share stories with.
On a final note, Facebook also released the latest version of its SDK for iOS. Version 3.5 of the iOS SDK includes support for all the above enhancements. The latest SDK only supports iOS 5 and above. You can download it here.