Facebook already has more than 350 million members who regularly way the social web through a smartphone or tablet, and it says those mobile users are more lively than the average consumer who interacts only through a desktop calculator. But until Monday, the full Facebook experience, such as the competence to look which games your friends are playing and connect in, hasn't been fully obtainable ashore a phone or tablet.
"Facebook will have an opportunity apt one-up Apple," which is selling media subscriptions as the iPad, "equitable for Google has tried to do," Ellison said. "Magazines are just beginning to scrape the surface for what they can do with social sharing."
One huge beneficiary of the Facebook changes are developers and companies that create mobile apps that can flee among the Web explorer of anybody mobile device using HTML5, the newest standard for the software language that underlies the Web. "HTML5 is the huge victor today," said Scott Ellison, an analyst with the research tight IDC.
"I muse the mobile user will see more of Facebook, more of the time," said Ray Valdes, an analyst with Gartner. "The mobile users have been variety of second class inhabitants in a lot Advertisement of ways.
Ellison said Facebook's new mobile services also could push journal publishers or other media companies to construct Facebook apps that could run on any tablet, offering content that users could buy using Facebook Credits, its digital money. Facebook gets a 30 percentage tear of services bought with Credits, analysts mention, and the payment service is a premonitory and growing share of Facebook's aggregate revenue.
Facebook's iPad app was warmhearted rumored to have been slated for a joint launch with Apple's iPhone 4S final week, and the timing of Monday's publication reawakened speculation that Facebook delayed the app because of Steve Jobs' impeding death.
The gist functions have been there with the iPhone app and other apps, yet these appended capabilities have been absent til now." While the new features loosened Monday were aimed at Apple's mobile devices, Facebook said it would also amplify assist to increased mobile platforms, particularly Google's Android, "from now on."
shine on the iPad,'' wrote Facebook engineer Leon Dubinsky in a blog post. "They're bigger and cozy to flip through, like a real photo album."
"This reduces the conflict between Apple and Facebook regarding within-app payment -- by the disbursement of Facebook," Valdes said.
"What Facebook has done today is they have inserted themselves into the mobile dispute to a similar level as Google and Apple have," said Stewart Putney, CEO of Moblyng, a Redwood City enterprise namely has built several browser-based games for Facebook. "We're an HTML5 developer, so we've been betting on this. We bet our entire corporation on this a year ago, assuming it would happen, and we're pleased namely it did."
"Any modern smartphone can immediately chance a Facebook phone, because you can get the full Facebook mobile experience," Putney said.
While the fashionable functions could help Facebook compete with Apple, the companies seem to have struck a concession -- while Facebook Credits can be accustom in HTML5 apps, they can't be used in native iOS apps for iPhone and iPad.
Fknow next to nothing offtware developers, the sheer size of Facebook's member -- more than 750 million -- means additional claim for alternatives to "national" apps, which are tailored specifically for Apple's iOS or Google's Android mobile operating systems and are typically downloaded to a call or tablet through those companies' proprietary app stores.
Facebook finally released its long-anticipated app for Apple's (AAPL) iPad Monday, likely a more visual, immersive and "amusement" experience for tablet users, in tandem with new mobile features that could permit the social network to antagonistic Apple and Google (GOOG) in selling access to games, videos, news and other content on mobile devices.
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Facebook releases iPad app
Facebook releases iPad app
Facebook releases iPad app
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