In a bid to catalyse app development on its mobile web platform, Facebook has announced that it would be participating in industry wide initiatives intended to support app development, focusing on technology standards and for enabling mobile payments. - Operator payments integration: Facebook said that it was working with mobile operators to streamline the flow of payments, so that the number of steps which are needed to complete operator billing based transactions in mobile web apps could be minimised. The company has joined telcos such as AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefónica, T-Mobile USA, Verizon, Vodafone, KDDI, SOFTBANK MOBILE Corp, to automatically enable payments when apps integrate Facebook Credits via the Pay Dialog into their apps. Speaking at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Facebook CTO, Brett Taylor, said that the payments experience of the mobile web was broken and that operator billing support, requires SMS device verification, which takes users outside of the normal flow of an app, while developers have to integrate with “hundreds of APIs” to support operators globally. He said that the new system will remove the need for the SMS verification step for the “vast majority” of customers, while providing developers with a single SDK to get global reach with “very, very simple” technical verification. Our take: This could easily pave the way for eliminating device based App Stores from the system, and for enabling a direct revenue sharing model between Facebook, developers working on its platform and mobile operators. So, to exemplify, Zynga could build a game on Facebook, for…
