Facebook chief technology officer Bret Taylor said today after the f8 keynote that there will “be no central repository” for apps on the platform. That means that the company is not working on a “Facebook App Store.” He also said that the new apps coming to Timeline through the open graph will be platform agnostic, meaning that they will cross browser and devices such as tablets and smartphones. Hence, there should be a whole new vertical of Web applications coming to Facebook’s mobile platform soon.
Taylor said that Facebook believes that users will discover apps through their graphs and sharing, which fits well into what was announced this morning at the keynote. Does it mean that Facebook is not going to go after Apple and Android native applications with a Web-based store? Not necessarily. Facebook today took the first steps that will bring its platforms games to every browser that can access the Internet.
What Facebook is really working on now is building a trove of data through the open social graph. Almost every announcement that CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced this morning had a mobile aspect to it, including music, video and news in the the Timeline.
To a certain extent, this is more of the same in terms of what Facebook has done with its mobile roadmap. Timeline is built to work with the browser and any device that has a browser capable of handling Facebook (from tablets and smartphones to PCs) will be able to run Timeline-based applications.
In terms of the open graph, Facebook is building upon its previous announcements and the open graph API.
Post f8 keynote press conference with Facebook executives including CEO Mark Zuckerberg, CTO Bret Taylor and head of products Chris Cox.
“We are basically taking the same brand (the open graph API) and expanding the scope of what it is capable of,” Taylor said.
Taylor said that Facebook is planning on educating users on how the new Timeline and open graph apps are supposed to work. Zuckerberg himself acknowledged that the Timeline and the open graph apps are “one of the biggest changes that we have made in years.
Even though there is no “central repository” coming for Facebook apps, that does not mean that the so-called “Project Spartan” that was ostensibly supposed to be an HTML5-based Web app store, is not in the works. Taylor said that even though it is not in the works right now, Facebook holds the option to do so in the future.
Later in the day at f8 there are multiple sessions on how Facebook is rolling out mobile and social development as well as what the company is working on in terms of HTML5 development. We will hit those sessions and update exactly how Facebook envisions its mobile future and HTML5 development later in the day.
