Facebook today announced the availability of a new native share dialog for iOS, which will give developers an easy way to incorporate Facebook sharing — including Open Graph actions — in their apps.

The mobile share dialog is a standard tool that enables users to post something back to Facebook. Similar to the Like button, the share dialog can be implemented with a small amount of code across any app and it works even if users haven’t logged into the app using Facebook. The dialog includes support for location tagging, friend tagging, custom privacy settings, deep linking and more.

Previously, mobile developers would have had to program their own sharing mechanism with these features or use the old “feed dialog” or iOS 6 Share Sheet, which are more limited in functionality and can require up to three extra steps for users.

Unlike Share Sheet, the native share dialog supports Open Graph publishing, as seen in the “read a book” example to the right. This is important because until now, developers had to ask users to log into their app using Facebook and allow various publishing permissions, which some users did not like.

Now, because the share dialog opens up the main Facebook app to complete the action, users don’t need to log into a third-party app with Facebook in order to share back via the Open Graph. As long as users have the Facebook app and are logged into that, they can easily publish to Facebook from any iOS app that uses the share dialog. This could greatly increase the amount of structured sharing through Open Graph verbs and objects.

Facebook first announced the native share dialog, along with other new mobile platform features, in April. However, it was only available in limited beta for iOS until today’s wide release. It is still in development for Android. The company says the share dialog should be used by default in all mobile apps that want to enable users to share something to the social network, even if the apps don’t have deeper Facebook integration, such as login or Open Graph.

Facebook offers a detailed comparison of all of a developer’s options for sharing back to Facebook — including the new share dialog, iOS Share Sheet, web-based feed dialog and Graph API – here. Technical documentation on the native share dialog is available here.

Facebook today announced an update for its Android homescreen experience Facebook Home to address performance and stability. Facebook also revealed at a press event at its headquarters today that in four weeks since the launch of Home on April 12, Home increased user engagement by more than 25 percent compared to the standard Facebook app.

Facebook measures engagement through two areas — feedback such as commenting and liking, and time spent in the app. Facebook director of mobile engineering Cory Ondrejka adds that Facebook Home, with its Chat Heads feature, has also increased the use of messaging. He says participation, which is how many users are actually using Messenger, saw a 7 percent lift, while the total volume of messages sent was up 10 percent.

Facebook plans to update Home on a monthly basis with the latest update arriving today, and future updates landing on June 9 and July 11.

Ondrejka revealed that Facebook Home has nearly reached the one million downloads mark. He adds that, for the amount of devices Home is compatible for, one million downloads was within Facebook’s expectations for Home in this time frame.

Facebook also addressed issues users have experienced with Home, including the lack of folder and doc support as well as a more intuitive way to initiate a discussion with Chat Heads. In a future update within in the next couple of months, users will be able to slide up as they normally would to bring up their apps — as seen to the right — but instead of a small pane with apps, it will be a full screen of apps set in a translucent background with folder support.

For Chat Heads, users will soon be able to drag their profile picture to the left, which will initiate the messenger list to drop down from the left. As for widgets support, Facebook is looking into it, but didn’t reveal any specific plans to integrate it.

Continue reading.

Parse, the cloud-based app development platform Facebook agreed to acquire in late April, today announced its latest product: Parse Hosting.

Parse Hosting enables developers to create a web presence for their app without having to manage their own servers or turn to another third party. Previously, Parse offered ways for developers to store their mobile app’s data in the cloud but didn’t host web apps or landing pages on the web for them until now. Parse says developers can deploy their web presence through Parse Hosting with only a single command.

Parse CEO Ilya Sukhar tells us that though the company has been focused on mobile first, many developers have a need for web hosting, and otherwise they have had to use yet another third-party platform.

“It’s a big piece of product infrastructure we’ve had a lot of demand for,” Sukhar says of Cloud Hosting.

The Facebook deal announced April 25 hasn’t closed yet, but the social network says it plans to keep Parse in operation. Sukhar says that the timing of today’s launch wasn’t planned as a follow-up to acquisition announcement, but that it is “symbolic” of the company’s focus on continuing to ship products.

“There are some folks that are a bit worried that the Parse platform will contract rather than expand,” Sukhar says. “I think this [launch] is evidence that Parse isn’t going anywhere.”

He says joining Facebook will allow Parse to grow more quickly in terms of hiring and innovation. Although Parse is a different type of acquisition than most Facebook has made in the past, which are typically for talent and not sustaining standalone products, Sukhar says getting to know the Facebook team and seeing their passion for the product made him confident that Parse would be at home under Facebook.

Currently, Parse has a free model, a $199 model and an enterprise level for its backend services, data storage, social integration tools and other features to make it easier for developers to build and scale apps across different platforms.

To learn more about this topic, join us at Inside Social Apps in San Francisco June 6-7. One of our Vendor Workshops is “Scaling Social Engagement With The Cloud.” SoftLayer Development Community Advocate Phil Jackson will examine what gaming, mobile and social media developers need to consider when building out their infrastructures, including how to deal with massive influxes of users – and what decisions need to be made to make it not only possible, but economical.

Editor’s note: On April 25, Facebook announced an agreement to acquire Parse, a cloud-based platform providing tools for mobile app developers. The mobile backend-as-a-service (MBaaS) company could be used by Facebook to make it easy for mobile developers to integrate its SDK and use Facebook login, Open Graph and other components of its platform. And with the recently completed acquisition of advertising platform Atlas, we speculated last week that Parse and Atlas could be made — or some parts of it — free to most advertisers and developers to bring them deeper into Facebook’s ecosystem, ultimately driving ad revenue. Ty Amell, founder and CEO at StackMob, a cloud-based mobile application development platform, explains why Facebook has a big problem on its hands, regarding the steep cost of its platform for developers that’s causing them to leave the platform for mobile. In an effort to stop the exodus, Amell elaborates why Facebook agreed to acquire Parse.

The Facebook acquisition is just the latest move of large public companies taking long hard looks at the MBaaS and API industries. Salesforce recently launched their mobile services platform, Microsoft is in preview with mobile services on Azure and Intel recently bought Mashery for $180 million. Not to mention Layer 7 being acquired by CA Technologies.

With Facebook’s most recent acquisition, does this mean Facebook is moving into the MBaaS space? The short answer: not necessarily. Facebook has a big problem — many of the game publishers that made money for Facebook are starting to leave the platform. While Apple can still get away with charging a 30 percent commission to app developers, Facebook is having a hard time justifying those types of commissions. Apple’s App Store is on rocket ship growth trajectory while Facebook’s platform growth may have plateaued. Without that growth, publishers are having a hard time justifying the steep cost of Facebook’s platform. Public companies like Zynga are having a hard time reaching earnings projections as more and more users move away from Facebook in preference of mobile. (more…)

Facebook today announced an agreement to acquire Parse, a cloud-based platform providing tools for mobile app developers.

Parse offers backend services, data storage, social integration tools and other features to make it easier for developers to build apps across different platforms that scale more efficiently.

Facebook is buying Parse outright, meaning this is more than the typical talent deals Facebook makes. Parse will continue to operate and offer its services. Currently, it has a free model, a $199 model and an enterprise level. The company says there are 60,000 apps integrated with Parse’s platform.

Facebook Director of Developer Products Doug Purdy wrote in a developer blog post today:

“We want to enable developers to rapidly build apps that span mobile platforms and devices. Parse makes this possible by allowing developers to work with native objects that provide backend services for data storage, notifications, user management, and more. This removes the need to manage servers and a complex infrastructure, so you can simply focus on building great user experiences.”

Parse is one of 10 recently named Facebook Technology Partners, which is similar to the Preferred Marketing Developer program, but focused on technical solutions for developers rather than marketers.

Parse says the deal with Facebook will not change existing customers’ contracts or affect their apps in any way. Parse apps will not be required to use Facebook functionality.

However, what Facebook can do with Parse is make it really easy for mobile developers to integrate its SDK and use Facebook login, Open Graph and other components of its platform. Basically a mobile app developer could potentially save time and money without having to redevelop their own app’s backend to access Facebook services. With this week’s acqui-hire of the team behind Spaceport — a cross-platform development framework – and now the Parse acquisition, Facebook seems to be making key moves to improve its mobile app platform.

Although Parse hadn’t disclosed its financials before it was acquired, selling backend services could be a new healthy stream of revenue for the social network, particularly as its revenue growth from games payments declines. It’s also possible that Facebook could make Parse available for free, making it more universal among developers so that it can get more of them building on their platform and buying ads. This could hurt others in the space such as Stackmob, Kinvey and Kii, which use a freemium model like Parse does currently.

This article originally appeared on our sister site, Inside Facebook.

Moodoo is a new iOS app from Urban Design. It’s available now as a free download from the App Store, though the store description suggests that it will become a paid app before long.

Moodoo is a “mood diary” app that allows users to record the way they are feeling at any given moment, along with the time, date, weather conditions, temperature and moon phase. There are eight different moods that can be chosen — love, happy, hopeful, bored, unhappy, scared, anxious and worried, upset and angry, or depressed. Each mood has an appropriate color code assigned to it — depressed is black, for example, while angry is red and in love is pink.

Once the user has selected a mood for themselves, they can record it in their diary with a simple tap of the “add” button. It can then optionally be shared on Facebook and/or Twitter if desired, and it is also recorded anonymously on Moodoo’s servers, with the user’s location information attached. The user may then not change their mood until at least five minutes has elapsed.

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Facebook today announced a number of changes meant to improve the experience and increase the possibilities for mobile developers building apps that integrate with the social network. This includes new Open Graph APIs, a standard mobile share dialog, faster login and a Technology Partners program to help developers find third-party solutions that suit their needs.

One of the most significant developments announced today is the Object API, which allows mobile developers to create Open Graph objects without having to host corresponding webpages. Previously, applications had to serve data into Open Graph through web endpoints, so native iOS and Android apps weren’t able to build the same types of experiences or gain the same opportunities for distribution and discovery as web-basedd apps, unless they have the resources to build a web backend. Now this won’t be necessary and mobile or web apps can use the Object API for easier object creation.

Facebook is also introducing an object privacy model to allow objects that have custom or non-public privacy settings. This is especially important for some of the user generated content that comes from mobile apps. Web-hosted objects, on the other hand, have always had to be public. To help developers manage all their objects now, Facebook created a new “object browser” interface — seen below — that aims to organize developers’ objects in a more visual and intuitive way.

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Slim is a new iOS app from Slim Labs, Inc. It’s available now as a free download from the App Store, with no additional in-app purchases. It’s currently highlighted in the “New” section of the store’s Productivity category. A Web-based version is also available, and a native Android version is set to follow soon.

Slim is a social media app that aims to allow users to trim all the irrelevant, useless content out of their various feeds in order to focus on the important updates. At present, the service only supports Facebook and LinkedIn accounts — a Facebook account is required to sign in at all, so those who only use LinkedIn are out of luck — but support for Twitter, Instagram, Google+, Salesforce and Yammer are apparently set for implementation in a future update.

Rather than taking a feed-based approach as with most social media apps, Slim displays a single update at a time and allows users to “swipe” between them. Users may mark the updates they would like to see more or fewer of by using some Last.fm-style “star” and “reject” buttons — from these, Slim apparently learns the user’s preferences and displays more relevant content over time, but it’s clear that there’s already some fairly heavy-duty filtering going on as soon as the app starts, as the vast majority of posts from my Facebook friends were nowhere to be seen. It would perhaps be better for the feed to start from an unfiltered view and allow the user to whittle it down to what they want rather than starting from an already heavily-sanitized position.

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The HTC First, a smartphone preloaded with Facebook Home, is now for sale from AT&T. Facebook also updated Messenger for Android to include support for Chat Heads, the feature debuted with Home last week. Home is expected to be available from the Google Play store later today.

Home is an Android homescreen experience that more deeply integrates the social network’s features into Android devices. It essentially eliminates the “lockscreen” as most people know it. Instead of displaying the time and perhaps some notifications, the screen fills with photos and updates from a user’s Facebook friends. Facebook calls this Cover Feed. Users can watch updates pan by slowly or quickly swipe through them manually. It’s possible to Like or comment on posts from this view.

We’ve been using Facebook Home for the past few days, and Cover Feed definitely feels like a better way to browse the latest posts from friends and pages. Switching back to the standard vertical scrolling feed with small images and text in the main Facebook app ends up being disappointing.

Continue reading on Inside Facebook.

Socialite for Facebook is a new iOS app from independent developer Bryce Satterfield. It’s available now as a free download from the Apple App Store, and also has an optional, separately-sold Pro version available that removes ads.

Socialite’s core concept is to provide an app that allows users to reconnect with one another based on their location as listed on Facebook. In order to use the app, the user must first provide their “home” location via GPS and optionally their phone number, then connect with Facebook. Once this is done, the user is then able to browse their list of friends according to geographical proximity and then interact with them accordingly.

When browsing the app’s “Friends Near Me” list, the user may view their friends either in a list sorted by proximity or on a map showing their current (or last checked-into) location. From either the list or the map, the user may tap on a friend to view a summary of their profile, which includes their Facebook profile picture, their name and their current location. From this page, it’s possible to view the friend’s Facebook profile (an option which switches to the dedicated Facebook app rather than viewing it within the Socialite app), send them a message either via Socialite (if the friend has it installed) or their Facebook profile, call them (if they have signed up to Socialite and provided their phone number) or “nudge” them. “Nudging” Socialite users provides an immediate notification; “nudging” non-Socialite users sends them a Timeline post informing them that you are in the area.

The app can be set up to automatically notify the user when their friends are within a certain distance of them. This facility can be customized — by default, the user must be 100 miles or more away from their defined “home area” before they will receive notifications of friends being nearby, and notifications will be received if friends are within a 50-mile radius. These distances may be relatively “small” for larger countries such as the U.S., but in smaller countries with smaller urban areas (such as the U.K.) the minimum distance of 50 miles is actually a significant way away — by several towns or cities in many cases. It would perhaps be more practical to have had the facility to see when other users are in the same town, or within 5-10 miles rather than 50.

This issue aside, Socialite has the potential to be mildly useful. Because it’s based on Facebook check-ins and location information rather than third-party services such as Foursquare, it’s a good means of easily keeping tabs on friends in the area. The fact it uses Facebook also means that it isn’t reliant on its own proprietary network — in fact, it’s not really all that clear why Socialite even has its own proprietary network, since all the features the app offers (sending messages, calling, nudging/poking) are already present in Facebook.

The app is free but ad-supported, with inconspicuous banner ads on the app’s main menu. The aforementioned “pro” version removes ads for $1.99 and claims to offer “additional perks,” but doesn’t elaborate on what these might be in the App Store description. At present, the ads are unobtrusive enough and the app isn’t fully-featured enough to justify a $1.99 price point. The developer should perhaps consider implementing the removal of ads via in-app purchase rather than an unnecessary separate download.

Socialite has some potential but doesn’t really do very much at present. This is fine for the free incarnation, but those paying for the app will probably expect a little more for their money. The app itself is certainly well-presented and intuitive to use — it’s just a little limited for now.

You can follow Socialite’s progress with AppData, our tracking service for mobile and social apps and developers.