Facebook Talks About Social Games and Mobile Apps for 2012

Facebook revealed its roadmap for social games and mobile apps for the rest of the year at the Inside Social Apps 2012 conference on Wednesday in San Francisco — and it’s good news for app developers.

Want to create an app for Facebook’s Open Graph? The mobile space presents a huge opportunity to create cross-platform social games, said Carl Sjogreen, director of product management at Facebook, who spoke to a packed conference center filled with IT insiders about Facebook’s projections for the mobile social gaming and app space for this year.

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

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

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Social apps are not as straightforward as creating an iOS or Android app. If you have an app that doesn’t allow you to play with friends who have different devices, that problems trumps any visual features lost by creating a cross-platform device. Social applications need to be inherently cross-platform.

What users want, he says, 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,” he said. “We have millions of people playing games on Facebook every day and that’s an important part of their experience.”

The moderator, AJ Glasser of InsideNetwork, asked Sjogreen about Facebook’s vision for how the API should work 12 months from now. Sjogreen said 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.”

Pinterest has been one of the most successful apps recently launched through timeline integration.

Facebook’s mobile web platform launched a late last year. This allowed users to access apps integrated with Facebook while on their mobile devices, in addition to desktop computers.

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

More than half of Facebook users access the site on their mobile devices. There are already 60 million people who engage with mobile apps on Facebook.

Late January, Mashable’s Pete Cashmore talked to Facebook’s Vice President of Partnerships Dan Rose to discuss Facebook’s ultimate goal behind all of the recent integrations with various apps, games and web tools. Rose said Facebook wants to be a “social graph” for all of its users.

Would you like Facebook to be a one-stop-shop for what everyone is doing on the web? Are you an app developer creating a mobile app for Facebook’s Open Graph? What are your thoughts on this? What do you think about Facebook’s plans for the future of social gaming and mobile? Tell us in the comments.

This story originally published on Mashable here.

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