September 22, 2011
Social News – Techlightenment and The Guardian announce Facebook app to help people discover what their friends are reading
London – Sept 22, 2011 – A new enterprise technology platform specifically designed to leverage the latest features from Facebook has been announced today.
Techlightenment, a part of Experian, announced new functionality in its ground-breaking SMART platform to enable publishers to take full advantage of the new wave of features released by Facebook.
The first product built on the SMART platform is the Guardian’s Facebook app – a first for the news organisation – which was announced today.
The Guardian Facebook app enables people to read and feature Guardian and Observer content from Facebook, increasing engagement levels. People who use Facebook will now be able to enjoy a more enriched social reading experience: they will be able to discover what their friends are reading through the Guardian app and also what articles are popular.
People can also control how their activity on the app is shared with friends. Activity will not be shared unless a person authorizes the app to begin sharing their activity with friends. They can turn this functionality off at any time in multiple places on Facebook and within the app.
Ankur Shah, CEO of Techlightenment said, “We’re very proud to have engineered such a strong and enterprise grade social solution for the Guardian with this, their first Facebook app. This app combines the brilliance of the Guardian’s content and their open platform with the brilliance of our SMART platform, which plugs into Facebook. The app has been built in partnership with the Guardian development team and makes it easy for people to connect with their friends and share the content they are passionate about.”
Meg Pickard, head of Digital Engagement, Guardian News & Media, said: “The app draws on the social functionality people on Facebook are already familiar with and makes peoples’ reading experiences more personal and relevant.”
Techlightenment’s SMART platform is a highly scalable environment to deploy social capabilities on the world’s leading sites. Techlightenment has created a comprehensive set of components that contain Facebook’s new functionality, amongst others.
Facebook® is a registered trademark of Facebook Inc.
Read Techlightenment’s white paper about the technology being deployed in this app.
