AP/AP - This undated handout product image provided by Facebook shows the company's App Center. Facebook is beginning to roll out its App Center to its nearly 1 billion users, so they can find games and other applications with a social component more easily. The App Center will initially feature about 500 Facebook apps, mostly games, that the company has reviewed to meet its quality standards.
Facebook points out that it drives traffic to apps, pushing users to the iOS app store 83 million times in May. In that sense, it’s not proper to think of the App Center as a direct competitor to traditional app stores. With only 600 apps, the App Center is hardly a comprehensive listing of apps — or even of apps that utilize Facebook’s infrastructure in some way. Instead, Facebook is clearly hoping that it can use its strength to increase the popularity of apps that use Facebook in some way, which increases Facebook’s popularity, and so on in a positive feedback loop. To help with that, the company says that it will only recommend “high quality” apps (read: apps that include Facebook in some way, even if only for authentication) and will also recommend apps that users’ friends are using.
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