Facebook’s New Timeline Apps Introduce New Actions Like “Bought,” “Want” And “Love”

Facebook has partnered up with sixty different startups to add their “stories” to Facebook Timeline, through apps that span different verticals from Food, Fashion to Travel.

Already apps like Fab.com, Foodspotting, Foodily, Ticketmaster, Pinterest, Rotten Tomatoes, Pose, Kobo, Gogobot, and TripAdvisor have signed on to share these stories — which go beyond what we’re used to on Facebook.

“When we say anything we really mean anything,” Facebook Director of Product Management Carl Sjogreen said as he took the stage and announced that verbs like “knitting,” “shared” are now a part of Timeline story options.

The new app actions are basically a conceptual expansion of actions posted by apps like Spotify and the Washington Post, and use verbs and nouns that go beyond the non custom actions like “listen” “watch” and “read” to “bought,””spot,””pose,””want,””love” and “become an expert.”

“Up until now people have been only able to share photos they took on Foodspotting on Facebook, but there’s only a small majority of our users that share photos,” said Foodspotting co-founder Alexa Andrzejewski, “Now if you discover a dish, like Maple bacon latte you can “want” it on Foodspotting and your friends can discover it to. Because who would want to miss a Maple bacon latte? The greatest thing for us would be to be able to see a dish go viral on Facebook.”

“What we tried to build with Timeline apps was that each app should pick the actions verbs and nouns that best defines their use cases,” says Facebook engineer Mike Vernal.

Vernal tells me that Facebook won’t limit apps to which verbs they can use, and each app will have anywhere between 2-10 verbs. The new verbs will show up in Ticker if an app doesn’t opt out of showing them there. Despite being open to unconventional verbs/actions like “nommed,” as of this time Facebook won’t support “dislike.”