Research in Motion (RIM) recently sent a press release to the BlackBerry community announcing that their BBM social platform is now open to BlackBerry developers through a public beta. This is the first public release of something RIM promised last fall.
BBM has been one of BlackBerry’s major selling points and is currently exclusive to the platform. Now, RIM will give access to BBM’s feature set to developers that want to introduce some more social features to their apps. This means that you can be playing a game on your BlackBerry and pull up a chat to discuss it without ever leaving the app, and you can be having these chats without having those contacts already in your BBM contacts. When an app is highly integrated into BlackBerry’s native app set (such as BBM or Calendar), RIM dubs it a “Superapp”.
Developers will now be able to leverage the features of BlackBerry Messenger like location sharing, file transfer, status and more into their apps. Not only will this expand the creative toolboxes of BlackBerry app devs, but expand BBM as well. RIM wants to make the popular messenger client less of a “solitary experience and more of a social experience.”
If you’re a developer interested in BBM and what RIM’s offering, check out BlackBerry’s developer portal.