Facebook Mobile eases access with Single Sign On and location Places

Proclaiming itself as the most popular mobile app in the world, Facebook has decided to mark the news that it's monthly active user base has hit 200 million by giving its mobile set up a refresh.

As detailed on the site's Developer Blog, Facebook is eager to ensure its mobile UI is as easy to manage as possible.

As such, the site is taking steps to clean up two areas: logging on, and location.

Signing on

"One of the challenges mobile developers wrestle with is login," claims Facebook software engineer Yariv Sadan in the entry.

"After a user logs in, you can deliver a beautiful, personalised experience. However, a large number of consumers never bother logging in due to the hassle of typing in a user name and password, or worse, dealing with forgotten passwords.

"All of these challenges are exponentially worse on a mobile phone."

As such, Facebook Mobile is set to employ a one click set up dubbed Single Sign On  first for Android and later iOS. Via just a few lines of code, users are able to log into their account from any app in a simple, streamlined manner.

Location, location, location

Also benefiting from an update is Facebook's Graph API, which now enables developers to tap into the network's location-based Places set up.

"Now you can access our database of Places and let users check in on Facebook from within your application," adds Sadan.

"With access to information about millions of locations, any developer can bootstrap the development of a location-based app without having to worry about licensing location data or seeding friend activity for new users."

[source: Facebook]