Facebook launches single sign-on and Places updates

Facebook has launched new services designed to make it easier for companies and developers to hook into its social networking applications, and has announced plans for a single sign-on service.

The company is making a push to get deeper into the mobile market, claiming that 200 million Facebook users accessed the site from a mobile phone in October, a figure three times as high as last year.

Facebook said that it wants to exploit this growth by making it easier for companies to link more closely to the site and make the most of any sales and marketing opportunities.

Supporting this is a single sign-on system which will let subscribers use one log-in to access a range of mobile applications.

"Our goal is to save you time so you can get to what you want to do. Just log in to the Facebook application on your mobile phone once," the firm said in a blog post.

"From then on, you can log in to any other application on your phone that supports single sign-on without typing a username or password again. This works on any Android or Apple device that supports multi-tasking."

Facebook has also updated its Android and iPhone applications, offering what the firm said is an improved user experience with its location-aware Places feature.

The site has signed deals with businesses that support the new check-in features, although these are limited to US users for now.