Facebook’s head of mobile products, Erick Tseng, speaking at an industry conference this week, announced that Facebook is changing its strategy to make it easier for third party developers to build mobile services which integrate with the social networking giant.
Tseng and Facebook are actively working to create a mobile platform for app development. He mentioned that 150 million users globally access Facebook on mobile devices, and that geolocation services will accelerate mobile growth, stating that “If you can actually layer on top of [location] some kind of social intelligence–not just the fact that I’m near Starbucks, but the fact that 30 of my friends really like this frappuccino over the last couple months–I’ve got an interesting use case.”
The social networking site boasts over 500 million users worldwide, and many internet users use the service exclusively. Location-based services for Facebook users would potentially open the market and help it gain acceptance by the masses.
