14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook's efforts to become a leader in the mobile space are no secret to anyone, nor the fact that the social networking site aims at becoming a real force over the entire Internet. At the MobileBeat 2010 Conference, the company announced one of its latest move aimed at the mobile space, namely the plan to make all of its desktop developer tools available for the builders of mobile applications too.
To put this simple, it would mean that the company's Open Graph API would become available for mobile application builders, resulting in the appearance of Facebook “Like” buttons, among other, into mobile software solutions. Open Graph is going mobile, and apps that do not have their own social-networking tools would include Facebook's social tools.
Eric Tseng, Facebook's head of mobile products and a former product manager of the Google Nexus One phone, is the one who unveiled these plans. “We really see mobile as the future,” he also said. Facebook did say a few times before that it plans on making more steps into the mobile market, and it already released dedicated mobile applications, but this latest move brings the battle to a who new level.
The market of mobile services is expected to grow significantly over the next few years and beyond. More and more users are accessing the Internet via their mobile phones, while using a great load of applications to stay connected with their friends, to work or to keep themselves entertained, and it seems that this is the spot Facebook is aiming at too.
The social networking destination already enjoys a number of more than 150 million active mobile users, up from the 100 million mobile users it reported back in February. In order to gain even more mobile users, and to benefit to the full from the general trend of mobilizing most apps and services, Facebook is set to roll out all of the necessary tools to mobile developers within the following five months.