During its f8 developer conference Wednesday, Facebook introduced new tools designed to make mobile navigation, sharing, and advertising a smoother experience, while enabling seamless communication among third-party apps and Facebook itself. Music was featured often during the presentation, with app developers Spotify, Rdio, Vevo, iHeartRadio, Soundcloud, and Mixcloud among those namechecked.
Among the new introductions were:
- AppLinks, an open-source, open-standards kit that allows apps to link to each other directly using a bit of code. It’s designed to prevent the snags mobile users experience when linking from one app to another. (Goodbye, stopover in the default web browser.) All the music apps named above were featured in the demo, along with photo and video apps such as Flickr, Hulu and Vimeo, along with the likes of Pinterest, Dropbox, and Facebook itself. Presenter Ilya Sukhar also said Spotify is working with live-music events site Songkick to use AppLinks to sell concert tickets.