The New and Improved Facebook Platform

Ben Ling, Director of Platform Product Marketing at Facebook, offered some valuable insights on the direction of Facebook’s platform to attendees of Graphing Social Patterns in San Diego. His talk emphasized increased support for applications that add long term value (such as Causes, an app that helps users support non-profit organizations) and tools that eliminate friction for users and developers.

We think some of the features he described might make it easier for developers in Africa (including the students attending our upcoming Developer Garage in Nairobi) to use the platform to generate an income for themselves by offering outsourced application development. A couple of the most important ones:

• Developer Marketplace – a matchmaking site for developers and companies looking to build applications
• Platform Internationalization – a smart way for users to translate Facebook into different languages
• Tools to integrate users’ payment information across the platform to enable one-click purchases and more options for monetizing applications

Have any ideas on ways to make the platform better for developers in low-income countries? Please post your comments below.