Some 350 million people access Facebook via mobile devices every month, and the social network is now giving app developers the tools to tap that exploding market with its launch of Facebook Platform for mobile.

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Facebook just might be suffering a case of usability envy — at least that’s what some technology pundits are saying.

Much more likely is a case of user-base envy. Instagram, Kevin Systrom’s iPhone-based photo-sharing application, already has seven million users and houses upwards of 750 million digital photos, having only launched on the App Store in October 2010.

Instagram’s popularity has to do with how easy it is to use — making it a snap to gussy up run-of-the-mill photos.

Regardless of what exactly prompted the social network to pay attention to how it handles photographs, Facebook now appears hungry for a piece of the action.

That assumes, of course, that Facebook is in fact going to add photo filters to its own mobile app, as Nick Bilton has suggested in The New York Times.

Facebook has not announced any new photo filter application. But the Times‘ Bilton cites two unnamed engineers at Facebook as allegedly claiming the social network plans to unveil a handful of photo filters. Apparently some of them resemble popular features on Instragram.

Uploading photos to Facebook from a mobile device still requires a patience-testing maze of clicks in a world where time is at a premium and competitors like Google Plus, Flickr and Twitter can do it faster.

But this may soon change.

What’s clear is that users care how their photos appear. Image quality, ease of loading photos and quality of display all matter to them. The photo-filter system offering the most of what users want is the one that will retain them. Until something flashier comes along, at least.

Further agitating the upcoming photo-filter turf battle is, of course, Apple; the hotly anticipated iOS 5 is expected to contain photo filters, possibly integrated into Apple’s mobile platform, according toTechCrunch.

Oh, by the way, have you checked out Instagram’s page on Facebook? It has 35,796 fans so far.

Do you think a Facebook-created photo-filtering application could compete with Instagram?

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Believe it or not, you can administer a Facebook page from your smartphone, to some extent.
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College coaches are adjusting to this generation of high school athletes by using Facebook for recruiting purposes. This is a multimillion-dollar business that social media is playing a stronger role in than ever before.

According to The New York Times, coaches use Facebook for half of their recruiting interactions. Coaches are realizing that teenagers prefer the bite-size communication of online messages instead of contact by telephone.

One example is Nerlens Noel, a 6-foot-11 high school junior and one of the top five basketball recruits nationally in his class. He has dozens of offers from schools like Connecticut, Duke, Florida, Kansas and Kentucky. June 15 was the first day coaches were allowed to contact high school juniors and Noel got 15 to 20 Facebook friend requests from coaches.

He prefers Facebook because he is allowed only an hour of free time at his prep school in New Hampshire and doesn’t want to spend it all talking to coaches on the phone. Noel has more than 4,200 friends on Facebook. He said he gets seven or eight friend requests per day and most are from fans trying to persuade him to play at their colleges.

Facebook also offers a window into a player’s life with the pictures they post, their opinions on colleges and what other coaches they are friends with (who are probably also recruiting them).

Coaches who don’t adapt to new technology could fall behind, like Southern California defensive coordinator Monte Kiffin, who refers to Facebook as Facemask.

Recruiting has evolved from email and phone conversations to social media partly because the NCAA banned coaches from texting athletes in 2007, citing the recruits’ expensive cellphone bills as one reason.

Restrictions on Facebook and Twitter communications have been added to the NCAA rulebook. Coaches may not contact prospects until just before their junior year of high school. They can contact athletes by Facebook message but are prohibited from contacting them through Facebook chat or writing directly on their public wall. On Twitter, coaches can send direct messages to possible recruits but not public messages.

The coaches’ phone calls are limited to once a month for juniors and twice a week for seniors, but the above mentioned social media direct messaging is unlimited during contact periods. However, there is some confusion because Facebook and Twitter messages can be received on cellphones and look just like text messages.

Readers, what do you think of college coaches using Facebook to contact high school prospects?

The NCAA Leadership Council is hoping to deregulate electronic communications between coaches and athletes and will bring its proposal to the board of directors in October.

Facebook Messenger debuts today in Apple’s App Store, offering iPhone and Android users a unified way to chat in groups with contacts from both the social network and the address books on their devices.

The launch marks Facebook’s integration of Beluga, acquired by the social network in March, and specializing in group texting.

And this is the social network’s first standalone application for mobile devices, aside from the main app for Facebook.  And it’s also free of charge.

“When you first log on, you see your existing messages, so it’s one-click-from the desktop to get to messagin. It offers a seamless mobile messaging experience,” explains Ben Davenport, a Facebook software engineer who’d  joined the company amid the Beluga application. “You can start one-on-one or group conversations with anyone in your Facebook network and anyone in your phone’s address book.”

The service allows users to attach location information to messages, along with photos, in real time. Dialogues initiated on mobile devices can be resumed on a desktop connection, or vice versa.

“One of the things we focused on with this release is speed,” said John Perlow, another Beluga hire who’s now a software engineer at Facebook.  ”While you’re conversing you get real time mesages pushed to your phone, so there’s very little delay in this system.”

Right now, roughly one third of the 750 million people using Facebook access the service via mobile devices. So extending group chat capabilities to handheld devices seems a logical step in the social network’s evolution.

Readers, does the idea of having group chats on your smartphone interest you?

Prison officials in Facebook’s home state have announced that they’re notifying the social network’s security department about profiles and pages set up on behalf of inmates, which violates the site’s rules.
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Soon you might be able to reset your Facebook password from your mobile device, plus use your handheld to modify or flag content already posted.
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Vodafone 555 Blue is a low-price feature phone, aimed at emerging markets, optimized for use with Facebook.
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When 63-year-old Jerry L. Cannon received a 17.5 year sentence on Tuesday for using Facebook to solicit and distribute child pornography, he sobbed like a baby.
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