467 days ago
Facebook Gaming Roadmap Revealed

At the Inside Social Apps 2012 conference on Wednesday in San Francisco, Facebook revealed its roadmap for social games and mobile apps for the rest of the year and app developers have a lot to be smiling about.

Director of product management at Facebook, Carl Sjogreen, spoke to a crowded conference center about Facebook’s projections for the mobile social gaming and app space for this year, stating that the mobile space presents a huge opportunity to create cross-platform social games.

“If you are building a social application….it’s really important to think about cross-platform,” he said.

“You sort of had to have a PhD in Facebook to build an app on Facebook,”  stated Sjogreen. Now, with the new Open Graph he announced they want to encourage people to create cross-platform social apps.

Creating social apps is not as simple as creating an Android or iOS app. If you create an app that will not allow users to play with friends who have different devices, that problems over rides any visual features lost by creating a cross-platform device. Social applications need to be cross-platform.
Sjogreen announced that “What users want is to create a dynamic Facebook timeline that tells their story — whether that means they’re sharing the games they play, vacation photos or their favorite recipes.”

“For the platform to be complete, we need to have all of that, we have millions of people playing games on Facebook every day and that’s an important part of their experience.”

Sjogreen was asked by AJ Glasser of InsideNetwork, about Facebook’s vision for how the API should work a year from now. Sjogreen replied that he’d like to create a better experience with games on the Open Graph, without interruptions and many opportunities to share.

“I think the potential for games is really huge,” he said. “We want to help every user find an app that makes sense for them.”

Facebook’s mobile web platform was launched late last year. This allowed users to access Facebook integrated apps while on their mobile devices, not just desktop computers.

“It took all applications that made the web platform so appealing and made them available on mobile,” Sjogreen said.

Over half of Facebook users visit the site from mobile platforms. There are already more than 60 million people who engage with mobile apps on Facebook.

What do you think of the new roadmap for Facebook apps?  Let us know in our comment section.