Originally published on Facebook on March 25, 2015 By Todd Hamilton.
Our goal is to make it easier for people to share great content from apps, and to provide the right tools for developers to build good social sharing experiences. We’re excited to announce new ways of sharing on Facebook with a new share sheet, refreshed Social Plugins, and App Invites.
A New Share Sheet
Today there are more than a dozen ways you can share to Facebook from apps on mobile and desktop. Developers are building a variety of custom sharing experiences, as well as using products we’ve built. This has driven high usage of sharing tools — in fact, people shared more than 50 billion pieces of content from apps in 2014.
At the same time, having all these different experiences makes sharing inconsistent for people, and requires significant work for developers. We’ve heard from people that they want certain improvements to the ways they can share, including:
- A consistent experience sharing content from many kinds of apps — so that things like tagging friends, adding a feeling, or choosing an image work the same way no matter which app people are using.
- A clear preview of the content their friends will see when they share.
- The ability to share to smaller audiences, including Groups and Messenger.
- The opportunity to share without having to log in to the app with Facebook.
We want to do a better job building the sharing tools developers need in order to provide a clear, predictable experience in their apps. So today at F8, we previewed a new share sheet that creates a consistent sharing experience for people using apps and opens up more places where content can be shared. It doesn’t require Login, and it’s easy to add to your app with just a few lines of code. And, with more than 700 million people using Groups and more than 600 million people using Messenger, this opens up big, engaged communities where content from your apps can be shared.
The new share sheet will be available soon, and we’re excited to hear your feedback.
Refreshed Social Plugins
Social Plugins help people express themselves in apps and enable developers to create more engaging, social websites and apps. We’re refreshing Social Plugins with updated designs and better mobile experiences that will help people engage with content off Facebook. Updates include:
- Embedded Video Player — A new full-bleed, responsive and interactive video player to embed Facebook videos on your site. The player features controls like play/pause, HD/SD toggle, and full-screen mode, and also lets people like or share the video right from the player.
Humans of New York from Facebook Stories on Vimeo.
- Comments Plugin – A cleaner design to make the plugin compatible with more sites and optimized for mobile. There’s a new moderation tool with improved spam filtering. We’re also introducing a beta feature that streamlines conversations across your Facebook Page and your website, driving higher quality discussions and more comments.
- Native Share and Send – Last year we introduced the native mobile Like button for iOS and Android. Now we’re launching mobile Share and Send buttons so developers can quickly get started with social experiences in an iOS or Android app.
You can read more about our Social Plugins updates, including other plugins we’ve redesigned and a few we’re deprecating: Recommendation Feed, Activity Feed, and Facepile.
App Invites, a New Way to Share Apps with Friends
App Invites
is a new way to grow your apps organically by letting people send custom, personal invites to their friends — and ultimately drive app installs across all mobile platforms. App Invites don’t end up on someone’s Timeline, or in their News Feed; instead, they’ll show up on Facebook in a completely new area we’ve built just for Invites. We hope this new tool helps people share apps more seamlessly, while driving installs for your app.