Facebook Launches Facebook Connect for iPhone
Facebook announced the new Facebook Connect for iPhone service at the SXSW Interactive conference in Austin, TX today. Facebook Connect for iPhone is now available with several participating applications. This new Connect service lets users link their apps with their Facebook profile to share data with friends, just as Facebook Connect currently enables for Web sites.
In other words, your iPhone apps can now have friends of their own. This means an application developer who has created an app for both the iPhone and for Facebook can enable you to invite players to interact with one another cross-platform.
During the conference, representatives from Playfish, Tapulous, Zynga, and Social Gaming Network (SGN) demonstrated how Facebook Connect for iPhone will work with games, enabling you to share scores in your Facebook feed and see which friends are online. You’ll also be able to invite both iPhone- and non-iPhone-using Facebook friends to play with you.
One of the most exciting games is likely to be “Agency Wars” from SGN. This spy game went live today. The game uses geolocation and lets you leave clues and set traps in real-world locations. You can recruit friends to your spy agency, or you can play against them. Other applications that will use Facebook Connect include the popular Urbanspoon and Flixster Movies apps. Urbanspoon lets you post restaurant pictures and reviews to your Facebook feed. Flixster demonstrated how users could use the iPhone app to find Facebook friends who want to see the same movies and see what movies they’ve liked. Slide, Citysearch, CitizenSports, Loopt, MTV, EA Sports, and several other companies are planning to launch Facebook Connect integration for the iPhone in the future as well.
