Liveblogging Inside Social Apps: The Future of Mobile App Discovery on Facebook

We’re at the San Francisco Design center, blogging Inside Network’s third annual Inside Social Apps conference. Founder of Inside Network Justin Smith sat down with Facebook Director of Software Commerce Cory Ondrejka for a fireplace chat called “The Future of Mobile App Discovery on Facebook.”

Ondrejka emphasized the value of construction HTML5 apps that users can access from any device and how integrating Open Graph will allow users to share their activity without interrupting gameplay.

Ondrejka revealed that half of Facebook’s mobile traffic comes through the mobile website and the other half comes from native applications. He said that the company spent much of 2011 improving its mobile touch site and integrating web technology in its native applications. For model, the iOS and Android apps now pull News Feed tales frankly from m.facebook.com so Facebook’s engineers can push design and backend changes without a software update.

“The trend of wanting the web to work really well is something that’s happening,” Ondrejka said. “It’s incumbent on us to write excellent code, show excellent examples and make it simple to integrate.”

Even if Ondrejka encouraged HTML5 development for cross-platform access, he acknowledged that some apps will demand advanced capabilities that are only possible as native experiences. Still, Facebook’s distribution channels function the same for web and native apps.

“The vital thing in this area our platform at this point is that we want all of these to integrate with Open Graph,” he said.

Since the company filed for an early public offering last week, Ondrejka was unable to chat about possible plans for advertising apps within Facebook’s mobile experiences. He instead focused on the organic channels that are available to mobile developers: Open Graph activity in News Feed and Timeline, app bookmarks and requests.

Facebook apps can now publish endlessly to Timeline and Ticker, which Ondrejka said will improve the gameplay experience. The strategy seems to be increase engagement by making games more enjoyable and organic discovery will follow.

“What Open Graph allows you to do is share in this non-interruptive way without saying ‘Hey, player, stop playing to issue a request’ I hope it opens up game design as broad as on other devices,” he said.

Ondrejka cited Pinterest and Washington Post Social Reader as excellent examples of how mobile apps can utilize Open Graph for discovery.