Facebook is infusing ‘life’ into its service with help of over 60 partners that will let users tell their friends what they are presently doing online – right from reading news to listening to music. The social networking platform is collaborating with Pinterest, Rotten Tomatoes, Ticketmaster, and many other diverse platforms for this purpose.
Prompting users to be more vocal and specific
The underlying concept is to make users get more vocal and specific about their activities. They now can easily publish their wide-ranging activities on Facebook pages, according to the director (platform products), Carl Sjogreen, who revealed this at an event held in San Francisco. “We believe this is just the beginning of a new wave of (user-driven) apps. We are excited about their potential.” For example, if one is doing some research on a travel destination on TripAdvisor, one could post the relevant details to Facebook.
The popular social network apparently wants to create more new opportunities from the point of view of advertising and prompt users to spend more and more time using its interactive features. Keeping this in mind, the new partnerships will help Facebook move in the direction of becoming a sort of a media hub, allowing it to compete with Google and Apple.
Facebook tries to get more ‘sticky’
Thanks to the so-called ‘open-graph’ system, updated last year, members have already been able to make use of a service from Spotify to display the songs they are playing apart from Washington Post’s websites to share interesting news bits.
The platform is being thrown open to all developers. The activities can be checked on three parts of the site: the Ticker, its News Feed and Facebook Timeline. Foodspotting, the Gogobot travel site and the Kobo electronic-book service are among the other partners. The broad idea is to make the social site more comprehensive and more flexible in terms of the actions people are taking and the way describe the same.
It’s a key stage in the evolution of Facebook as a holistic user-centric network. Explaining how an array of Apps can infuse life into your timeline, an official post mentions:
“Once you’ve added an app, you can begin updating your timeline with your activities as they happen. For example, if you love design, shopping or fashion, you can add the Pinterest or Pose apps to make your favorite items part of your timeline.”
The new arrangement will allow Facebook developers to create applications better customized to the target audience, stated the San Francisco startup Ticketfly CEO, Andrew Dreskin, incidentally another partner in this program. Ticketfly sells tickets to several events like music concerts. The site now features buttons to let its users ‘Like’ particular artists on Facebook after they buy tickets. Visitors can click on new buttons to denote ‘I’m Seeing’ a band to their Facebook friends.
