Facebook Launches Open Graph Mobile, Updated iOS SDK With Improved Login And Sharing

Facebook today unveiled three new products at its Mobile Developer Conference in NYC that will put the company on an even faster track to becoming a mobile-first platform.

The company announced Open Graph mobile, which takes Facebook’s social graphing product to the mobile platform for the first time. Facebook is also improving Login via mobile, and releasing a new Facebook SDK 3.5 for iOS.

Alongside unveiling the latest initiatives toward a mobile-focused Facebook, the social network also released its latest figures for mobile, which include over 680 million mobile users and the fact that over 81 percent of iOS apps and 70 percent of top 100 grossing Android apps integrate with Facebook.

In terms of Open Graph mobile, Facebook simply wants to make it easier for developers to integrate the Open Graph into their mobile apps, a feat that has proved difficult in the past. But with a new Object API, Facebook is cutting out the web server.

“With the Object API, you can directly create Open Graph objects and no longer need to host webpages with Open Graph tags. This API is available for both mobile and web apps,” reads the press release. Facebook has also released an Object Browser, which is a visual interface that lets developers interact with their published object data. Alongside the Object Browser, you’ll also notice that Facebook has introduced a new object privacy model that improves sharing of user generated content within native apps.

Past that, the company also released native Share Dialog, a tool that lets users share experiences from native mobile apps without needing to log in to Facebook first. It also has built-in support for publishing Open Graph actions, so it makes sharing within developers’ apps much better “with just one line of code.”

Why is this important? Two things really.

For one, more apps using Open Graph lets Facebook pull more content into the news feed that it can monetize with ads showing alongside it. Plus, Facebook will receive more structured data about user activities, which again, brings us back around to targeting ads.

Where log-in is concerned, Facebook is launching a faster login dialog (20 percent faster, to be exact) that gives users more control over their permissions and privacy. Facebook realized a few months ago that their newest permission model on the FB platform was seeing a 5 percent increase in mobile conversions, and so they decided to bring that feature to their developers as well. Starting today, the new login dialog will automatically be applied to mobile and non-game web apps with no change required to the code.

Last, but certainly not least, Facebook is launching the Facebook Technology Partners program to help developers leverage these new products across all the potential platforms out there. According to the release, “these partners offer technical solutions that include SDKs, plugins, tools and services to help developers build great social apps.”

Here’s the initial list of partners:

• C# SDK for Windows 8 by Microsoft
• Corona SDK by Corona Labs
• Kinvey
• Node.js by Thuzi
• Parse SDK by Parse
• PhoneGap by Adobe
• Sencha Touch by Sencha
• StackMob SDK by StackMob
• Trigger.io SDK by Trigger.io
• Unity Social Networking Plugin by Prime31
• WinJS by Thuzi

TechCrunch » Social
Jordan Crook

Hello Social Launches Platform And API For Building And Monitoring Every Aspect Of Social Marketing Campaigns

Hello Social is a new Toronto-based startup launching today, with the aim of improving the amount of useful data captured from online social media marketing campaigns. The startup, co-founded by design professional Dominik Dryja and technical lead Bartek Nowotarski, provides tools for companies looking to run campaigns like contests on platforms like Facebook, or via their own web properties, and provides intelligent metrics around those contests to help identify trends and opportunities to drive greater engagement and higher conversion rates.

At launch, Hello Social offers the ability to create one kind of social promotion campaign from its web-based platform, a Photo Contest for Facebook. Creating the contest is simple: you first name it, choose from a range of settings, including setting the number of entries allowed per participant, how many entries can win, whether users have to Like your page to participate, and when the contest closes, among others. You assign a brief description, contact details and terms and regulations/privacy policy (supplied by your own legal department) to make sure everything is on the up-and-up.

Then you set an age gate, and are able to specify what kind of data you want to collect. Contests are in all cases a way for brands to generate leads, so this is the crucial step. Contest creators can enter as many fields as they like, including things like name and email, as well as custom fields for gathering any kind of data. Then once you select a design and set the broadcast message for Open Graph and friend invites, you’re good to set it live.

“We’re giving the tools for Internet companies to track very simply whether he’s actually an engaged user, whether he’s actually recommended something, whether he’s a paid user, all coming soon in future releases” Dryja explained in an interview, talking about the range of possible options in terms of data you can gather. “There’s no system right now that delivers this kind of solution, and we’d like to continue in the future developing things in that area.”

Through the API, developers have even more freedom in terms of what they can create, since they can build those same contests into their own landing pages, marketing web pages and existing online services. Contest participants can then access and engage with the same contest from multiple locations around the web, effectively making it a way to turn contests into essentially portable apps.

Hello Social charges a flat $ 199 fee per campaign, and then a recurring rate of $ 4.99 per day for the duration of the contest. This is in contrast to competitor platforms, Dryja says, which are locked down to specific platforms, or which charge different rates based on volume and business size. The whole idea behind Hello Social was to try to make the campaign creation process completely transparent, from pricing, to code, to results. The startup is currently bootstrapped, and Dryja says while they’re considering seeking outside funding, they haven’t made any decisions yet, and are already actually working with their first commercial partner on a major campaign launch.

TechCrunch » Social
Darrell Etherington

uBiome CEO Jessica Richman Speaks at TEDMED, Launches Website

The uBiome crowdfunding campaign is the largest successful citizen science initiative, raising over $ 350,000 and involving over 2,500 participants from over 40 countries, who pledged their support in exchange for having their microbiomes sequenced, including the Australia, Canada, Netherlands, France, Germany, India, Singapore, Israel, Uruguay, Bulgaria, South Africa, Estonia and the United Arab Emirates.

SOURCE LINK: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2013/4/prweb10644061.htm

Tags: big-data, citizen-science, crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, jessica-richman, microbiomes, tedmed, ubiome

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Pocket Launches ‘Send To Friend’ Feature For One-To-One Sharing As It Hits 35M Saves Per Month

Save for later service Pocket debuted a new feature today, which allows users to quickly send content saved to their Pocket accounts to contacts from within the app. The feature uses that most old-school of social sharing means, email, but updates it with more modern social features, adds in-app and push notifications, and saves frequently used connections for easy future access.

The Send to Friend feature focuses on sharing as communication between two people, rather than the kind of broadcast model of one-to-many generally preferred by the most popular social networks like Twitter and Facebook. Pocket founder and CEO Nate Weiner explained that the company was finding email was the most popular method of sharing on the platform, so it made sense to flesh out that feature.

“If you think about consuming, the act of doing it is private – you’re not sitting next to somebody reading, but once you’re finished with it you want to share,” he said. “With Pocket, we feel like we’ve done a really good job of that private consumption experience, and with this release, we’re thinking about how do we solve that social side of things. What we’re seeing is, when you look at Pocket and how people share today, the number one way people share is via email.”

Shares via email exceed the total number of times content is shared via Twitter, Facebook and other social media channels combined, Weiner explained. That’s because with the type of content people value enough to save for later consumption, there seems to be a feeling that it’s best shared with specific people you think would be interested in that subject. Pocket’s goal was to make it much easier to share to that small group you tend to share with more frequently.

Pocket’s new share menu bubbles up a person’s most frequently used share sources, and that can now include friends and family they email most. And when you do share, you can include more than just a link – if those you share with are on Pocket, they’ll receive an optional push notification about the content, as well as any comments or highlighted sections you choose to include in a new Pocket app inbox, so there’s more context around why they thought you’d be interested.

I asked Weiner if he thought that Pocket’s one-to-one sharing might have anything in common with/to gain from the rise in popularity of messaging apps like WhatsApp, which recently revealed that it’s bigger than Twitter by active user base.

“This one-to-one thing, which nobody sees because it’s all happening privately, is so much bigger than the activity that’s happening on the public network, and I think it largely gets ignored,” he said. “But it ends up being a much higher volume, a much better signal and a much more high quality share, so I think the one-to-one stuff is really important, and I think people are going to start noticing that very soon.”

Pocket is now seeing around 35 million saves per month, which is way above its 2012 pace, when it totaled 240 million saves for the entire year for an average of around 20 million per month. This new sharing feature should result in even bigger numbers as it helps users surface more interesting content to one another.

TechCrunch » Social
Darrell Etherington

Google Ventures-Backed Messaging Startup, Just.me, Launches iOS App In 155 Countries/32 Languages, Aiming To Rattle Social’s Cage

Following its beta launch at the end of January, just.me, the mobile messaging startup from Keith Teare, co-founder of TechCrunch and partner at incubator Archimedes Labs, has launched its first app, available initially for iPhones and iPod Touch. Just.me had planned on an earlier release of the app but said today it held back so it could launch at DEMO Mobile to garner more attention.

As with any messaging app, just.me’s usefulness is commensurate with the number of friends fully on board with the service so getting the word out to drive app downloads is now priority number one for its founders. Just.me does support messaging going outside its bounds, to non-app users, but to access the full suite of features conversation participants need to join in.

Just.me also has a more complex feature-set than the average messaging app, so arguably has more work to do to educate potential users and convince them it’s worth sticking with it through the learning curve. Rather than focusing on selling itself as just a (free) messaging service, as some of its messaging rivals have, just.me has grander ambitions: it’s agitating to replace centralised social networks with the contacts in your phonebook plus its tabbed sharing structure.

The app supports private one-to-one messaging; contained group messaging; and public broadcasts, the latter on a public just.me cloud (similar in concept to Twitter). It also allows users to talk to themselves by using the app as a private journal and/or storage service, a la Evernote. So it’s offering a spectrum of messaging types, private and public, all within the same service.

These features make it a lot more ‘high concept’ than the average messaging app — closer, perhaps, to the likes of NHN Japan Corp’s Line, which is also styling itself as a social network replacement and also offers multifaceted sharing options. Unlike Line, though, which is replete with stickers and cartoonish mascots, just.me is not so heavily targeting the youth market.

Just.me has a clean, professional look (see screenshot gallery below) with a focus on displaying users’ own photos that’s most reminiscent of Path or Facebook Home. Add to that its ability to function as an email-plus-multimedia-attachment replacement and just.me seems most likely to appeal to older, professional power users — who are seeking to collapse the functions of multiple apps into one low-friction interface.

Facebook Home is a step forward for mobile software… We can see the end of single use apps in this move.

Since just.me’s beta debut at the start of the year the competitive mobile messaging landscape has shifted a little, with Facebook launching its Facebook Home launcher on the Android platform. Home is a skin that sits between the OS and third party apps, pushing the latter outside the user’s main sphere of attention. Just.me is not currently competing with Home, since Home is not (fully) available on iOS. But Teare & co are working on an Android version of their app — due in six to eight weeks — so will be rubbing up against Facebook’s new-look mobile face soon enough.

Asked whether Facebook Home makes just.me’s user-acquisition task harder than it might otherwise be, Teare argued the opposite, telling TechCrunch: “Facebook Home really makes things easier. People will understand a user-centric approach with an app that caters for multiple user needs.

“Facebook Home is a step forward for mobile software. It represents an attempt to support multiple user goals on a single platform. We can see the end of single use apps in this move. just.me shares this vision of a combined messaging and social media app capable of supporting all of a users goals. We are happy to be in the same company as Facebook here.”

While conceding it’s an inevitable challenge for a 14-person startup to compete “in a field that contains giants”, Teare said just.me’s distributed openness vs the “walled garden clubs”, its range of sharing features and an initial rollout that encompasses “155 countries from day one, in 32 languages” (albeit, on only one mobile platform) will help it stand out. And rattle some cages.

“We do not see ourselves as competing with Facebook Home. We are far ahead feature wise and very different in that we are an open and distributed network, not a centralized one. We rather see ourselves as offering users features and controls that others have yet to build,” he said. “We want to be a major player in delivering multi-faceted messaging to users.”

Just.me raised a $ 2.7 million Series A back in 2011. Its investors include Khosla Ventures, SV Angel, Google Ventures, True Ventures, Betaworks, CrunchFund (which is of course tied up with TechCrunch in several ways, including the fact that our parent company AOL is an investor), and individuals including Don Dodge and Michael Parekh.

TechCrunch » Social
Natasha Lomas