The Kindle Fire Is A Bit Anti-Social

I received my new Amazon Kindle Fire yesterday and today I spent most of my time with it exploring the applications available for it in the Amazon Appstore. One shocking discovery is that none of the official apps from Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ are available for the Kindle Fire. When you start the Kindle Fire for the very first time you will see a Facebook icon displaying in Favorites, however tapping it launches the mobile web version of Facebook in the Fire's web browser. The mobile web version of Facebook is actually pretty robust and it probably meets the needs of most users, but it doesn't support Chat. If you browse the social networking section of the Amazon Appstore you will find a similar "app" that you can install for Twitter, which installs an official Twitter icon on the Fire that launches the mobile web version of Twitter. While the mobile web versions of Facebook and Twitter have plenty of features that work well in the Kindle Fire's web browser, they do miss some features like Chat and Sharing that a native app can provide. Fortunately, several third party apps are available that work well with Twitter and Facebook that help fill the gap. You likely are familiar with some of the apps like Seesmic, HootSuite, and TweetCaster, all of which you can use to read your Twitter timeline and post tweets, and these apps also provide a way to read your Facebook newstream and update your Facebook status. FriendCaster is a pretty good third party Facebook app that provides access to most of Facebooks features. The Google+ Android app is not available for the Kindle Fire, and there are currently no third party apps available for accessing the service. You can access Google+ in the web browser at plus.google.com. If you search for Google in the Amazon Appstore you will find that there are no Google apps available. The only appearance of Google on the Fire is from the search field on the home screen, driving home the point that the Fire is not an Android or Google tablet, but rather completely an Amazon tablet. My search for social networking apps in the Amazon Appstore did yield one native application, the LinkedIn app, which is the same version for Android that we have written about previously. I am not surprised that Google+ is not available, but I am shocked that neither the Facebook or Twitter apps are available. Because both apps exist on other devices running Android, I pretty certain there are licensing or other business issues preventing these apps from being available. Hopefully Amazon will be able to work out those issues to make these apps available on the Kindle Fire.

Social Pro Daily

The Kindle Fire Is A Bit Anti-Social

Frank McPherson

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