In its latest big announcement, social media giant Facebook is taking the next step into integrating every aspect of your life into Timeline, with the launch of 60 new integrated apps into the platform.
Since its launch only two years ago, the ‘Like’ button has become ingrained in our social subconscious – integrated into more than 2.5million websites. Now though, ‘Liking’ something is simply not enough.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants us to ‘live our lives out loud’ on Timeline, and has made it easy for us by developing the Open Graph to create a new way of interacting with apps, content and brands.
60 partner companies are working with Facebook to roll out a new range of integrated apps that incorporate ‘Actions’ – an expansion on the ‘Like’ button. Current apps include Pinterest, eBay, Foursquare, Tripadvisor and MapMyRun, among many others.
Where previously you would be able to ‘Like’ products and apps online, posting an automatically generated link to your Wall, now you can share with your friends the clothes you’ve bought, the products you want, books you’ve read and films you’ve reviewed.
Instead of ‘Liking’ a book you can tell friends you’ve ‘Read’ it through Facebook’s new Actions plug-ins. Where you would previously ‘Like’ an item of clothing in an online store, now you can ‘Want’ it. The stories generated will not appear in your friends’ News Feeds but in the side Ticker, the light-weight real-time stream of activity that shows various minutiae from your friends such as Actions to songs they’re listening to on Spotify and status updates. Not all of these will appear in your News Feed, and will ‘disappear’ from the Ticker as time passes. Every interaction you’ve had with apps will be stored on your Activity Log – which only you can see.
The move has great potential for marketers, giving more meaning to the social interactions we have with products and brands online, moving on from the simple inexpressive ‘Like’ to more meaningful and specific connections. The move will enable businesses to further understand the relationships that we as consumers have with the products we consume (and the sentiments we express around those interactions and relationships) – and enable even more targeted and effective marketing than ever before.
