I share your opinion of the facebook for Windows Mobile app being terrible. Having grown accustomed to the gestures and kinetic scrolling on my Touch Pro2, the one thing that I cannot stand in the app is their non-kinetic scrolling.

I really do think they should hire some mobile app devs to help on this front and/or sponsor the community to make apps that don't suck.

As for the article itself - Tag is a visual "barcode" and from what I understand, it's just an encoded URL that the app can understand in a variety of lighting conditions. No service dependencies AFAIK but that is just an educated guess on my part.

I actually think that its great big developers like Microsoft contribute to other platforms.

However, as a Windows Mobile owner, I would rather they concentrate on creating some great apps for their own mobile OS first before expanding elsewhere. Point in fact, their piss poor attempt at Facebook for WM which is anything but useful forcing many like myself to use the mobile or touch versions of the facebook website, certainly not ideal.

Why would Microsoft developed barcode reader on Android? Any analysis on that?

Maybe some of their (upcoming?) web services uses the data stored in barcodes, so this would actually increase the usage of that service...

But what would that service be? Is it out already? Bing? Can one input data from barcode to Bing?