The team at Socialize has released a new action bar that centralizes the user interface of its mobile engagement platform. Developers can now drop the Socialize SDK into their app and create an bar where users can interact within the app through Facebook, email, text and Twitter and also use in-app commenting.
The new action bar can either be a stand-alone feature within an app or developers can strip the UI from the bar itself and just place the functionality of the action bar within an app. As the Socialize SDK is open source, developers can add the social engagement layer that the startup provides in whatever way they want. This is a significant step for the startup but the team has more up its sleeves coming soon.
Socialize is a 10-person startup based out of San Francisco that grew out of a consulting and development firm that CEO Daniel Odio and partners sold to boostrap AppMakr, the beta channel for Socialize products and kind of parent company. Socialize has doubled its end users from 45,000 or so to 95,000 in the last 30 days and the beta channel has a significant presence with more than 3.7 million end users. Socialize has raised $1 million in angel funding and has been focusing on building its core product and revenue sources before taking any more money.
The action bar is a good step for Socialize as it gives developers and users a more tangible UI to use that will in turn generate data that developers can act upon. Socialize has 25 million activity records on file and growing quickly between the apps that 2,000 developers have created after downloading the SDK.
What Socialize did not announce in its blog post today but is coming down the road soon is an activity bar to match the action bar. The activity bar acts as the in-app notification system of what users have been commenting on, liking and sharing on Facebook and Twitter. The activity unit rests above the action bar and can be seen in the image below.
Socialize has worked with several large organizations to create engagement layers within apps for particular example surrounds the San Diego Chargers, a National Football League franchise that used Socialize to engage the fan base. Charger fans now have a dedicated mobile social network that can be tied to a community, a location or and event (like a home game) through the app. Predictably, it seems that fans are using to call for the ousting of the coach.
Developing a social community can be a great avenue of growth for startup application makers trying to gain users and traffic. It is a cheap way to acquire users outside of paid acquisition channels and keeps users coming back to app. Social layers also create data that developers can act upon to make changes to their apps based on user behavior and community feedback.
Developers – what tangible benefits do you see in adding a social layer to your apps? Let us know in the comments.
