Facebook Connect Arrives for Mobile, Showcases Nokia App

Facebook has announced a new way for mobile developers to add its Connect identity-sharing service to mobile web sites and applications. As with Connect for the web, Connect for Mobile Web lets users authorize developers to access their personal data. This means users will be able to sign into mobile web sites and applications using their Facebook identities, and post items directly into Facebook's news feed. The service is only available for mobile web browsers, with a few exceptions. But Facebook mobile head Henri Moissinac said today that the company also plans to offer native libraries for each mobile platform so developers can build applications on any device. You can already see a sample version from live-streaming video service Qik, screenshot at right, where users can access Facebook Connect on the company's Symbian client. Facebook has previously released Facebook Connect for the iPhone, and has worked on custom implementations of Connect with various handset manufacturers, including Nokia. Today's announcement is about making mobile integration easier and more widespread in order to reach more mobile users. The company says that 65 million of its 300 million monthly active users accessed its site from mobile devices in August, that's up from 20 million mobile users just eight months ago. As Facebook expands into markets around the world where mobile devices are more prevalent than computers, look for its mobile stats to continue skyrocketing. To show off how Facebook can be used for mobile devices, Nokia also recently announced a new "lifecasting" application to be available for its N97 device as well as the N97 Mini due out next month. Users can access the feature set from an Ovi lifecasting widget on their phones' homepages, so sharing detailed information with Facebook friends is quicker and easier than with older Nokia integrations of Facebook. The app, as leaked earlier this week, also uses the phone's internal global positioning system to let a user share their location with Facebook friends, including the option to attach photos and share them directly into the Stream. The preview video on Nokia Beta Labs also highlights a rating feature (with photos) for your favorite places, news feed updates on music you're listening to, updates about your sports teams and some sort of mobile updating of your location to your news feed when you're on the move. You can watch the video, below.

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Facebook Connect Arrives for Mobile, Showcases Nokia App

Eric Eldon

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