Facebook and apps Timeline: new actions

Facebook has taken their applications to another level with users now able to perform additional actions in addition to Like.

The Timeline was the big announcement made during Facebook’s last f8 conference which took place in September 2011. The Timeline has been available on all global Facebook interfaces since December and today it is time for applications to be updated in this Timeline.

Currently there are about sixty applications for Timeline (Mark Zuckerberg has alluded to new application classes) which draw from the new Open Graph to be able to offer links with new actions. This could cause a few issues for users that have been for a long time used to only having the Like option for something, which will now be able to share all kinds of other activities and have a range of buttons.

Facebook is also talking about "improving the Timeline" with "applications which help tell your life, whether you like cooking, eating, holidays or even writing film reviews". Once again, developers will be able to match an action with the proposed content.

Before this wider range of applications that are available with the Timeline, Spotify had, for example, been one of the first applications to allow users to share the content that they were listening to with their friends. When listening to something, an indication was sent out that your user was listening to a song on Spotify.

Such applications cover numerous fields (music, computing, entertainment, holidays, food, shopping and fashion) already have a range of partners present on this page.


To share…
The user has to provide their authorisation for applications to use their information and share it on the profile page and news stream. The activities will also appear in the Ticker. It will be possible to change the applications settings at a later date (publish your name on Facebook, add to the Timeline, and who can view the details…).

Creating friends lists will likely be a crucial aspect for some users, although all users should be thinking twice before installing an application in the Timeline as the information sharing from this will be done automatically.