Social Apps Launched: Facebook Joins The Platform Wars | Social Media Today

iOS, Android, and Facebook? Is the world ready for three mobile platforms?

Facebook ‘s quest to improve its mobile presence just took a step forward with its own App Center. Following its first and biggest acquisition with the Instagram deal, Facebook now intends to bring their own apps to users for marketers and brands to create more strategies using the world’s largest social platform.

The App Center was launched at Bluxome Street Winery in San Francisco where Facebook executives Matt Wyndowe and Doug Purdy gave developers a glimpse of what to expect about Facebook’s App Center features. Among the partners for Facebook’s latest mobile endeavor are Path, Stitcher, and Voxer. So why is Facebook producing its own apps already?

The App Center wasn’t a surprise considering that a Facebook phone is in the works. If you’re still wondering what’s the real score about Facebook running its own Apps Center then you probably haven’t heard of the Facebook phone yet. The social network has poached some Apple engineers to make a Facebook phone which suggests that it intends to monopolize its own brand through its own mobile platform together with its own Apps Center. A phone is something you’d use to connect more people through social and mobile combined, but cloning the iPhone is a bad idea that should be avoided.

The way I see it, Facebook is trying to make its mobile presence a destination-location as well. I’ve always told in my posts that I perceive Facebook as a marketplace of sorts for brands and customers. And nowadays, the biggest market out there is mobile.

Arguably, Facebook is thinking like Google in many ways. It knows that it’s one of the biggest and influential brands in the world today, and the direction their treading is brand proliferation through mobile development. It doesn’t want to limit itself as a mere social network, Facebook wants to monetize their brand by presenting itself as a marketing tool.  It refuses to be like the social networks that came before it. But to overwhelm mobile, you need to leverage on your most valuable assets – users.

Win on mobile, win the crowd.

via socialmediatoday.com