Facebook Timeline Gets TripAdvisor, Foodspotting Social Apps

Facebook Jan. 18 introduced new social applications for its Timeline user interface, adding 60 popular programs for brands such as Ticketmaster, Rotten Tomatoes and TripAdvisor.

Facebook began rolling outs its Timeline UI worldwide for desktop and Google Android smartphone users in December. A bid for Facebook to better leverage older information about users for social advertising, Timeline packages older photos and other information from earlier in users’ lives on one homepage.

At launch, Timeline integrated with popular applications such as Spotify and Netflix, allowing users to automatically share their music-listening and movie-watching activities with their friends on the network.

For example, when a user watched a movie or TV episode on Netflix, a “story” about that activity would publish in the user’s news “ticker” activity stream. The idea is that users don’t have to manually share every time they read a news story, listen to a tune or watch a flick.

The 60 new social apps, which provide a fuller measure of the Facebook Open Graph program the company unveiled along with Timeline at F8, offer more diverse activities.

These include stories about dishes users cooked and ate using Foodspotting and Foodily, places they’ve traveled with TripAdvisor and Gogobot, and movies they’ve reviewed via Rotten Tomatoes. Users can decide who can see their apps and may remove posts from the app from Timeline.

Users will be able to post stories about their snowboarding, gardening, hiking or knitting adventures via social apps Facebook will add in the future, Carl Sjogreen, director of platform for Facebook said in a blog post.

VentureBeat and AllThingsDigital have more details on how the social apps work.

Facebook has more than 800 million users worldwide. The leading social network facing challenges chiefly from Google, whose Google+ social network is adding new features weekly.

While Google has added a games apps section to Google+, it remains to be seen whether and when Google will integrate with apps similar to Facebook. Google’s move there may be predicated on the successful of Facebook’s social apps.