Parse, which Facebook acquired in April to boost its mobile development, announced a major milestone Thursday: 100,000 apps built on the platform. Parse CEO Ilya Sukhar announced this on the company blog:

We’re really proud to announce today that we’ve had over 100,000 apps built on the Parse platform, up from 80,000 apps at the end of April. We grew more in the last month than we did in our entire first year of existence!

It’s never been a more exciting time to work on Parse. We recently joined forces with Facebook and have accelerated on all fronts.

Parse has integrated with Facebook but still works independently. It is a cloud-based platform that provides tools for mobile app developers. Facebook purchased the company outright in April, in order to strengthen its mobile side. Parse offers backend services, data storage, social integration tools and other services so developers can build mobile apps on different platforms. Facebook’s mobile aim, after all, is to create the best experience, regardless of what kind of phone is in hand.

Fitness applications are growing in popularity — largely because they work well, especially when a user connects the app to their Facebook account. While it’s difficult to measure Facebook-connected fitness apps’ success in terms of pounds lost, developers are claiming that users who sign into the app through Facebook tend to keep using it.

For instance, on RunKeeper, when users share their fitness activities on Facebook, there is a 40 percent chance that they will continue to use the app. Whether it’s peer pressure or the positive engagement from friends, users of Facebook-connected fitness apps tend to keep going on runs, walks, and bike excursions when they sign in through the social network.

Jackie Chang, a partner manager for fitness apps at Facebook, recently spoke with Inside Facebook about how people use fitness apps such as Endomondo and Nike, as well as what’s ahead for the platform — including improvements in timeline and Graph Search.

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As more Facebook users check their News Feed from their phone, the mobile app install advertisement is becoming the hottest trend for developers. But it takes more than just a screenshot of the app to get a user to download it.

Leah Na’aman, the marketing manager for SocialClicks, talked at the Inside Social Apps conference recently in San Francisco to share some best practices for really reaching customers and potential app users through the News Feed.

The one fail-proof tip? Blue hair.

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Today marks the six-year anniversary of the Facebook Platform, something that has been defining for Facebook as a company and already influenced a number of industries.

Now, Facebook is making its next big moves for the platform by introducing app services — new tools for developers that make it easier to build applications that span different devices and put users at the forefront. This is seen most clearly with the acquisition of Parse, a mobile backend as a service company, which will continue as a separate brand with a freemium services model for the time being. Facebook also recently hired the team behind Spaceport, a cross-platform development framework, and stealth software startup Osmeta, which was reportedly working on something related to enabling simpler development across devices.

“We’ve been thinking about how we can provide tools to developers to enable a more cross-platform world,” Facebook Director of Developer Products Doug Purdy said at a media “whiteboard” session Thursday. “We’re trying to create a platform that developers can build something that spans over devices and makes people the center. Regardless of the device that you or your friends are on, everyone can have a rich experience.”
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Digital promotions platform Ifeelgoods today announced that it has been named a Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer with an Apps badge.

The company offers customizable white-labeled Facebook apps that deliver digital rewards to customers. For example, a retailer could incentivize people to make a large purchase by giving them a $10 iTunes gift card in return. After the user completes a transaction, the Ifeelgoods integration will allow him or her to connect with Facebook and claim the gift card. Users will also be prompted to share back to Facebook or on Twitter. Ifeelgoods says 60 percent of customers do this.

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In the first half of 2013, Facebook has made a number of moves to improve its platform for entertainment and lifestyle applications.

New Timeline sections give users a place to save and display their favorite books, movies, TV shows and music. Developers can use new common Open Graph actions like “want to watch” and “want to read.” Users can share what they’re listening to, eating, feeling and more through structured status updates. Graph Search lets them find content and recommendations through friends and others. And a deal with Rovi gives Facebook a detailed database of information about movies, TV shows and celebrities

We spoke to Facebook Manager, Strategic Partnerships Ime Archibong about the new opportunities for entertainment apps on the platform, Facebook’s expanding role in content discovery, and how Open Graph can represent our offline activities and memories. The following is an edited transcript from that interview.

Inside Facebook: So it seems like a good time to talk to you now with the the new Timeline sections, News Feed and Graph Search all launched. Let’s start by talking about the state of Facebook’s entertainment platform.

Ime Archibong: I’m really excited about the suite of assets that are available for apps right now, in the entertainment space particularly and in the music space, which is one of the things I’m most excited about. You have things that are great for users. Take sections in the Timeline redesign that came out. Users now have a home for where their music consumption goes, and I’m pretty excited about that.

News Feed continues to be an important piece of distribution property for apps. With the redesign and the prominence of the music section coming out, that’s another huge asset. Graph Search. I think we’re still a ways away from where we’re going to go with Graph Search, but there’s no mystery that Open Graph actions will be showing up in Graph Search at some point, and that’s going to be a good source of traffic for these entertainment apps.

And I like what we’re doing in mobile right now. The new pages redesign is slick, it’s user-centric. If you think of that as a music artist’s home base in the Facebook ecosystem, and as we make it more engaging for users, it’s a good piece of real estate for artists themselves. I look at all these assets starting to stack up and how they come together and make us a meaningful distribution platform for these apps.
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This is a guest post from Jed Singer, director of client engagement at Stuzo, a creative technology company and Preferred Marketing Developer with Pages and Apps badges.

The Facebook News Feed is becoming evermore critical to engagement on Facebook. When you design branded social solutions, they need to serve as conduits for storytelling. 100x more people are likely to see the stories that your social product or campaign pushes out than will ever actually experience the product or campaign.

This amplification through the Timeline and News Feed is inherently key to awareness and viral distribution of the brand’s message, but it’s even more important because those stories in the Timeline and News Feed are more accessible by mobile users (63 percent of Facebook users) than the solution, itself, today. This focus on the “story” can mean success or failure of the program as it relates to actual business outcomes — the metrics that matter.

There are also other ways to have consumers effectively story-tell through a branded social experience: Rich Media News Feed Experiences. This is an HTML5 experience on mobile and a Flash media unit that is the experience within a promoted page post, or pushed out of a custom experience on Facebook (by either a user or a page). Both can be activated and engaged with directly within the News Feed.

Even into Q2 of 2013, these are rare for brands, but they are extremely effective at engaging users. Some, like Dunkin Donuts, Rovio, and Lexus have leveraged such units in their social repertoire. At Stuzo, we make sure that clients are intimately aware of the possibilities; one of our most successful Rich News Feed Experiences was for People’s Choice Awards this past season, which enabled fans to explore all of the award categories and vote for their favorite nominee. This gives users the full voting functionality in-stream and exposes them to the main business metric for the People’s Choice Awards — votes — without having to leave their News Feed browsing experience.
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Facebook today announced a number of changes meant to improve the experience and increase the possibilities for mobile developers building apps that integrate with the social network. This includes new Open Graph APIs, a standard mobile share dialog, faster login and a Technology Partners program to help developers find third-party solutions that suit their needs.

One of the most significant developments announced today is the Object API, which allows mobile developers to create Open Graph objects without having to host corresponding webpages. Previously, applications had to serve data into Open Graph through web endpoints, so native iOS and Android apps weren’t able to build the same types of experiences or gain the same opportunities for distribution and discovery as web-basedd apps, unless they have the resources to build a web backend. Now this won’t be necessary and mobile or web apps can use the Object API for easier object creation.

Facebook is also introducing an object privacy model to allow objects that have custom or non-public privacy settings. This is especially important for some of the user generated content that comes from mobile apps. Web-hosted objects, on the other hand, have always had to be public. To help developers manage all their objects now, Facebook created a new “object browser” interface — seen below — that aims to organize developers’ objects in a more visual and intuitive way.

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Wildfire, the social media marketing platform owned by Google, announced Tuesday that it is shutting down its self-serve Promotion Builder product.

The company will instead offer promotions solely as part of its Social Marketing Suite for enterprise clients. Basic, Standard and Premium promotions will be retired June 30. Promotions data will be available for export up until July 31.

The Social Marketing Suite covers ad buying, page management, conversation monitoring and analytics, in addition to promotion development. Previously, anyone could visit Wildfire’s site, sign up for an account and start creating and running social promotions, such as sweepstakes, coupon offers or user-generated content contests. Now, Wildfire doesn’t offer any pricing information on its site and asks potential customers to contact the company directly.

Smaller brands and businesses could look to alternatives like Offerpop, North Social or Heyo, which give marketers a range of tools for running social promotions and creating other custom experiences across social, mobile and web properties, but without the cost and commitment of an enterprise contract.

Forrester assesses social relationship platforms

Forrester Research released a report Tuesday evaluating eight top social relationship platforms in terms of their current offering, strategy and market presence. Shoutlet received the highest score for current offering and Spredfast had the top score for strategy. Salesforce.com’s Buddy Media led in market presence.

Forrester looked at Adobe, Hearsay Social, Salesforce.com’s Buddy Media, Shoutlet, Socialwave, Spredfast, Sprinklr and Syncapse, rating each on 49 criteria. Overall, the study found no clear leaders in the space, but most were “strong performers.” Socialware and Syncapse were in the lower tier of “contenders.”

Shoutlet led the current offering category largely because of its comprehensive feature set and easy onboarding. Spredfast excelled in strategy because of its highly satisfied customer base, which found its measurement and reporting capabilities to be the strongest of all platforms.

The full report, “The Forrester Wave™: Social Relationship Platforms, Q2 2013,” is available for purchase here.

ShopIgniter updates rich media advertising platform

Social marketing and commerce company ShopIgniter this week announced an update to its Igniter platform, which helps companies create rich media posts on Facebook, as well as its entry into the paid media management space.

The combination gives brands an end-to-end solution for running interactive advertisements in the Facebook News Feed. For instance, a company could show off a new product line with a video and image gallery that link to the retailer’s website or includes an entry form for a related sweepstakes. ShopIgniter provides templates, but experiences and design are fully customizable.

Instead of hosting these experiences in page tab applications that users hardly visit, ShopIgniter presents them in-stream so users can interact with and share the posts directly from News Feed. ShopIgniter says rich media posts generate more engagement and less negative feedback than traditional posts.

ShopIgniter now has a small media buying team to manage campaigns for clients. Sr. Director of Strategy Justin Kistner, who recently joined the company after leading product at Spruce Media, says he’s bringing on more media buyers and a product team is in the works but for now the company is mostly advising clients on how to apply paid media to their rich media posts created with ShopIgniter.

Facebook is testing different designs for the mobile login process for third-party apps and sites that connect with the social platform.

In December 2012, Facebook announced changes to the apps permissions process, which separates read and write permissions into different dialogs. This means users have the option to log into an application and receive a personalized experience using their name, friend list and other aspects of their profile, but they can reject the app’s request to publish activity on their behalf.

As that rolls out across desktop and mobile, the company has been testing different versions of the permissions dialog to improve the design and performance. The following is what users will see on an iOS device when logging into a site that uses Facebook Login. After users accept the first “read” permissions request, they can accept or skip the “write” request. They can also change their default privacy setting for the app. If an app wants to manage a user’s ads, events, notifications or other products, it will have to request this in a third dialog.

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