BBM Social Platform – Now In Public Beta
This means that the BlackBerry developer community can now take advantage of the powerful social aspects of the ultra popular BBM service (an active user base of over 28 million).
Enhanced Developer Experience – Empowering features
With this beta release, Java developers have access to APIs and features that allow them to build important functions into their applications. They are user permission based and include accessing and updating fields in the user’s profile, creating custom areas within the user’s profile, initiating and embedding chats with friends, initiating file transfers, sharing applications virally with friends in their contact list.
Developers also have the ability to test the exact workflow and BBM integration that they can expect to see on a live device. This is made possible by special simulators for BlackBerry smartphone OS 5.0 and 6.0.
More developers will take advantage of the amazing features of the BBM Social Platform starting in April 2011 when full support for the BlackBerry WebWorks platform is planned to be added.
Enhanced End User Experience – More than just chat
With this release the BBM Social Platform revolutionises social interactions. The end user’s experience can now be extended beyond just messaging/chat to a whole new breed of socially engaging apps including multimedia, gaming, location-based services(LBS), VoIP, video and commerce. What was previously a solitary experience becomes now a social experience. Users gain the ability to discover new apps with friends and share real-time experiences and content with their inner circle. They enjoy the full advantages of the BBM community – always-on and unparalleled immediacy and responsiveness.
Joanne Carter
Joanne Carter is a British photographer, photography journalist, editor and curator and the founder and editorial director of TheAppWhisperer.com, an independent international photography publication established in 2009.Her journalism, criticism and commentary have appeared in The Times, The Sunday Times, The Guardian, Financial Times, BBC, Vogue Italia, LensCulture, Popular Photography, Android Magazine, NikonPro, DPReview, Which Digital Camera and Which Camera. She has lectured internationally on photography and mobile art, served as a juror for international photography awards, and exhibited her own photographic work across the UK, Europe, South Korea and the United States.Alongside her editorial work, Joanne's photographic and postgraduate research explores death, grief, memory, representation and social inequality through contemporary photography, participatory practice and visual research methods, with the longer-term aim of developing this work through doctoral research.Through TheAppWhisperer, she continues to publish independent photography journalism spanning contemporary photographic practice, mobile imaging, photographic apps, computational photography and emerging imaging technologies.Joanne is available for editorial commissions, photography projects, judging, curatorial work, speaking engagements, consultancy and selected collaborations.
