14 DAY TRIAL // Research In Motion announced during the annual BlackBerry Developer Conference, the new BBM (BlackBerry Messenger) Social Platform, which gives developers the necessary tools to build applications that take advantage of the social aspects of the popular BBM service.
The platform helps developers to integrate a wide range of BBM service functions into their applications, such as: chat capabilities, content sharing, as well as invitations.
According to RIM, users will be able to invite their BBM friends to join them in a game and then chat during the game.
“The BlackBerry developer community has been eagerly awaiting the opportunity to integrate BlackBerry Messenger with their apps. BBM is a very popular service with over 28 million users and opening its real-time social connectivity to third party applications presents incredible opportunities,” said Alan Brenner, Senior Vice President, BlackBerry Platform at Research In Motion.
“Access to BBM services from within apps will revolutionize gaming, enhance multimedia experiences, and add a new dimension to location based applications,” added Brenner.
Some of the key features of the new BBM service includes:
Contact list, which allows users to choose from their BBM contacts from within another application in order to initiate social interactions such as chatting or initiating game play;
BBM user profile, which allows an application to insert application status updates into the user's BBM profile, so it can be launched or downloaded from BBM by the user’s friends;
Application-specific communities, where users will be able to create BBM friend groups according to the application they use;
Data Transfer, will allow users to transfer pictures, audio, video and other content directly from an application to their BBM contacts or groups.
Thanks to the new BBM Social Platform, RIM is trying to give BlackBerry developers the possibility to integrate the power of BBM in their own applications.
Several BlackBerry Alliance members like Kik, Kobo and Telmap are already testing the BBM Social Platform as part of an early access program.
The BBM Social Platform is expected to be available in the spring of 2011.