Lykle de Vries

At 10:30 PST, Facebook held its “mobile event” with 7,000 viewers watching. In his opening remarks, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, “Our goal is to make it that no matter what platform you are building for that your apps can be social…And that over the next few years, industries will be rethought as social applications.” He also mentioned that 200 million people now use Facebook via mobile devices.

Facebook for iPhone updated

Facebook Places Comes to Android

Single Sign-On

Facebook Places API Update

Facebook’s Read, Write and Search API is now open. This is competitive with the Google Places API. They also announced an update to their Android SDK with an update to the iPhone SDK coming next week.

Deals

Facebook is building a platform for local stores and places to offer deals to nearby Facebook users. What does this mean? You will be able to read where your friends are, write and publish check-ins back into the graph and search for relevant places.

According to Facebook, the thing that has been missing with check-ins is that those local businesses can’t communicate with customers. Facebook hopes Deals will enable merchants to push deals out to their existing customers and to attract new customers. The Deals concept turn store’s online visitors and eyeballs into real people, dollars and experiences.

Types of Deals Individual deals: Merchants set up loyalty deals available to users through their mobile devices. Friend deals: An obvious move for Facebook, merchants will allow offer special deals to users who bring their friends like free appetizers at a restaurant. Charity deals: businesses will let users check-in and donate money to a charity of their choice.

All in all, 20,000 small to medium sized business are expected to sign up with Facebook deals through their easy self-service platform. The velocity of this has not been lost on Zuckerberg who added that they only launched Places two months ago. Read more at thenextweb.com