Potential App Store integration for Facebook

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Facebook wants to reduce the “signal to noise” ratio in your mobile life according to the firm’s head of mobile products, Eric Tseng.
Speaking at MobileBeat 2010, Tseng said the majority of push notifications, especially for current location based services, were “just spam” and that he, personally, wouldn’t use them. “Everytime you go past a Starbucks you get a ping. If I had that app on my phone, I’d switch it off,” he said, adding that only if that ping was “socially informed” would it prove useful.
If your phone could tell you that three of your friends were in a particular starbuck close by, or that 20 of your friends had tried and “liked” the pumpkin Frappuccino, “now I’ve got an interesting usage case,” he said.

“We want to turn this whole mobile platform into a Facebook,” said Tseng, whose company already boasts 150 million mobile users from its overall 500 million users. The number of Facebook mobile users is up from just 100 million in April and Tseng admits “mobile is fast becoming our growth lever.”
Indeed, over the next six months, Tseng says the social not-working firm will be making a massive push into mobile, in an attempt to “catch up” with the PC Facebook experience.
Developers will be happy to know that Facebook plans to update the application programming interfaces for its Android and iPhone apps sooner rather than later, according to Tseng, who also said the firm was hammering out partnerships with other sites to create better mobile “social graphs.”
This, he said, could mean that by partnering with other sites (like Yelp or Groupon for instance) Facebook mobile users might soon be notified if a restaurant in their vicinity has a promotion on, or could check to see what ratings friends have given certain local businesses.
App stores, said Tseng, would become more social. “As we get more apps that’s great, but users aren’t going to use hundreds of thousands of apps on their phone. Social context is going to help,” he maintained.
So is Tseng saying app stores could soon come with Facebook built in to their DNA? “It’s not a stretch of the imagination,” answered Tseng, remaining coy about announcing any details.
Asked specifically if Facebook was in any discussions with Apple to integrate Facebook into the App store, Tseng shuffled nervously, said he couldn’t “talk about it” but added “it is very possible that will eventually happen.”
Facebook isn’t only befriending the device makers here in the US, the firm has reached out and poked India too, by partnering up with one of the country’s largest carriers, Bharti Airtel.
Indian subscribers tend to still have more feature phones than smartphones, so Facebook is working with Airtel to allow its subscribers to join Facebook through a stripped down, text only version of the site on the 0.facebook.com mobile service, without needing a data plan.

Of course, the plan behind targeting those without a data plan is to slyly suck them into thinking they need one, and adding another few million people to the mobile data pool (and Facebook) globally. “A lot of these countries are getting data for the first time, and don’t necessarily know what to do with it,” he said.
Looks like Facebook is getting friendly with carriers too then. “Carriers are a very, very important part of the ecosystem, partnering with carriers in any geography helps gets your message out and helps with distribution,” confirmed Tseng.
Asked by RCR if a “dislike” button would soon be finding its way to either PC or mobile, Tseng said Facebook was “not into making a fragmented experience for mobile, so if a dislike button comes it will be for both PC and mobile.
“feature request noted” he added.
One feature that won’t be finding its way onto Facebook mobile anytime soon is mobile advertising, which Tsend says his firm currently has no interest in. That’s not to say it won’t happen in the future, but for now, you can continue to throw virtual sheep at your friends, ad free.