MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS – Facebook’s CTO Brett Taylor today unveiled a new strategy whereby the social media giant will work with 30 device makers, mobile operators and developers to boost the performance of Facebook apps on mobile devices.
Taylor introduced Ringmark, a new mobile browser test suite to help developers understand their apps’ potential reach and prioritise which browser capabilities matter the most.
The social network is also joining more than 30 device makers, carriers and developers in an industry-wide effort to accelerate the standardisation of browsers.
Taylor revealed that at present there are 425m monthly active Facebook mobile users and more than 60m people are visiting mobile apps via Facebook 320m times every month.
He said there are more than 475 mobile operators worldwide working to deploy and promote Facebook’s mobile products.
Taylor explained that a key objective is to minimise the number of steps required to compete m-commerce transactions in mobile web apps.
This will make it easier for hundreds of millions of people worldwide to purchase apps on their devices via operator billing.
A new Pay Dialog billing system devised by Facebook takes three steps to complete a transaction compared with the traditional method that required eight steps, including an SMS confirmation.
“Our hope is that these initiatives – the Open Graph, the Core Mobile Web Platform Community Group at the W3C, and our partnerships with carriers to improve mobile payments – will enable developers all over the world to build mobile experiences that improve the lives of billions of people,” Taylor said.
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