Facebook’s Open Graph, the platform that extends and spreads Facebook’s social network throughout the web, is going mobile, according to Facebook’s Head of Mobile Products Eric Tseng.
At the MobileBeat 2010 conference in San Francisco, Tseng said that Facebook
“really sees mobile as the future,” and that we can expect to see Facebook’s “Like” buttons in mobile applications soon.
Tseng used geolocation as an example to illustrate the power of the mobile Open Graph. If you were to walk near a coffee shop and get a location-aware notification that there’s a happy hour going on there, you’ll probably be even more inclined to visit it if the notification comes bundled with recommendations from your Facebook friends.
He also had some interesting ideas about mobile app discovery, which he thinks will become more social. Without going into the details, Tseng said that “Inevitably, app stores will become more social. As we get more apps, that’s going to be great. But the average user isn’t going to go through thousands of apps on their phone.”
As far as Facebook’s mobile user base goes, Tseng puts the number at 150 million users, adding that mobile users have fueled Facebook’s immense recent growth.