Mobile Messaging App Tango Debuts A Content Platform, Will Now Power The Social Layer Of Third-Party Apps & Games

Tango, a mobile messaging and video calling app with now over 120 million members worldwide, is expanding its service by opening its platform to third-party developers. By integrating the newly launched Tango software development kit (SDK) into their own applications, mobile publishers will be able to add a social layer into their apps meant to better reflect users’ real-world connections with family and friends. Gameloft is the first of a dozen or so launch partners to debut apps using the new Tango platform. Gameloft will soon be releasing an app in called “Candy Block Breaker for Tango”?on iOS, and that will be then followed by “JetPack Jinx for Tango,” developed by?Bubble Gum Interactive. This is a major move for the mobile social communications service, Tango, which has been steadily transforming itself from just a video calling app to rival Skype into something that more closely?resembles?a mobile social network. Already, users could call, video chat, text, leave voicemails and video messages, and even play games within Tango’s mobile application, but this is the first time the company has made access to its so-called “social graph” to other applications. According to Tango CEO Eric Setton, Tango users have been playing tens of millions of games within the app every month – something that would see the app ranked toward the top of the app store charts if it called itself a mobile game, he says. “But we found that we can’t do everything we want to inside the app, in terms of putting out the most compelling content out there and presenting it to our members,” Setton explains, “so we basically becoming a bottleneck.” With the new Tango SDK, the idea is to create an experience that’s more like playing games in the real world – like during a family board game night, for instance. However, though the initial partnerships are on the mobile gaming side of things, Tango’s SDK will be open to developers of any kind of app looking to to add a social layer. The SDK allows the third-party apps to connect with its network, pull down a list of friends, and then allow those users to message each other using text, picture and video, similar to how things work in Tango itself. It also includes social leaderboards, which shows how users’ scores compare with friends, and it allows for both competitive and collaborative in-game mechanics. For example, app

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