An executive at Vancouver’s Hootsuite says the company welcomes the social media giant’s attempt to unify the apps that connect to it.
Hootsuite VP of Business Development, Greg Gunn, was on Fox’s “Varney and Company” with host Stuart Varney to talk about Facebook’s newly announced AppLinks.org, an open standard platform that will connect mobile apps.
Gunn says that Hootsuite, which he says is one of the biggest developers on the Facebook platform, had noticed the lack of an open standard was hindering interconnectivity and ghettoizing the mobile experience.
“Facebook is now endorsing an open standard to help connect separate fragmented apps on this ecosystem,” says Gunn. “As you know Apple and Google have built out their mobile platforms and they are quite fragmented, so that when you want a Hootsuite to connect with another app like a Tumblr there isn’t really a great way to connect them. Really what Facebook is doing is they are the folks that are going out there and saying this is something that we need for the web. The mobile web needs to be as interconnected as the desktop.”
Facebook announced AppLinks.org at its F8 conference last Wednesday. Initial partners include Spotify, Pinterest, Hulu, Tumblr, Flickr, Vevo and Canada’s Wattpad.
A video posted to YouTube Thursday by Facebook explained one imagined real world scenario that the offering solves.
“Say you browse a movie review on Rotten Tomatoes. If you want to see if it’s playing at your local theatre and buy tickets you can’t just tap a link. You have to leave the app and search again in another app.”
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