In an age of smartphone addiction, you’ll find a Facebook user checking and updating from pretty much anywhere. But what about from the car itself?
Six months ago, the Mercedes-Benz engineering team began developing a Facebook app. The new product offers a way for drivers to access Facebook friends who are close, or nearby restaurants that their friends have “liked” on Facebook. The feature will be available in the 2012 SL-Class Mercedes this spring as part of the mbrace2 telematics system, which includes cloud-based apps, traffic and navigation assistance, speech recognition and Internet browsing. mbrace also features a smartphone app, which allows drivers to send information to their vehicle before actually stepping into it.
“Now that cars have screens that are intelligent, you would expect that more and more car manufacturers will want to make those screens capable of allowing people to connect with their friends and take advantage of the social context that comes along with that,” Facebook Vice President of Partnerships and Platform Marketing Dan Rose told Reuters. “One of the core things that people do on their screens in the car is GPS navigation and the ability to see which of your friends are nearby is something we think will be really interesting for people.”
Kodak announced Facebook integration into two new cameras, along with two new Facebook apps especially for creating photo albums from profile photos.
Mercedes-Benz is not the only brand to announce Facebook integration at CES 2012.
In another step toward the future of social TV on Facebook, DirectTV is slated to unveil a Facebook social TV app, which allows users to share what they’re watching and add commentary.
