Facebook unveiled more than 60 new apps

Facebook Inc. is adding more than 60 partners to a service that lets users tell friends what they’re currently doing online, from listening to music to reading news. The company is working with Pinterest, Ticketmaster, Rotten Tomatoes and other applications to let users publish their activities on their Facebook pages, Carl Sjogreen, director of platform products, said yesterday at an event in San Francisco. For instance, if someone is researching a travel spot on TripAdvisor, they could post the details to Facebook.

The activities can be seen on three parts of Facebook’s site: the Ticker, News Feed and Timeline. The service lets Facebook developers create applications that are better customized to their users, said Andrew Dreskin, chief executive officer of San Francisco startup Ticketfly Inc., another partner. “It’s the evolution of Facebook.” Ticketfly, which sells tickets to music concerts and other events, has added new buttons to its website to let users “Like” specific artists on Facebook after they purchase tickets. The world's largest online social network unveiled more than 60 new apps Wednesday that let users share the tiniest details of their lives on their Facebook profiles, now known as their Timeline. Facebook users can already share the music they are listening to through apps such as Spotify, or the articles they are reading through Yahoo News and other services. Facebook is calling it "frictionless sharing."

It means once you sign up for the apps, they will automatically share your activity through Facebook.--Facebook expects developers to create thousands more in the coming weeks and months.--Joining "likes" on Facebook, the social network has added dozens of new types of posts, including "bought," "read" and "want." Sixty applications that let users publish information automatically to Facebook launched at a news conference held at a trendy nightclub here on Wednesday. Apps for foodies, like Foodspotting and Foodily, can publish to a user's Facebook profile when she updates her digital diary of meals. Ticketmaster can publish to Facebook when customers buy concert tickets.

Some 400,000 people coming from Facebook have signed up for MOG accounts since September, and each day, Facebook sends an average of 4,000 people who have never visited MOG before, David Hyman, the music company's CEO, said in a phone interview. Facebook programmers have created a mathematical algorithm that will examine the types of posts a person has chosen to give prominent placement to on his or her profile, Facebook CTO Bret Taylor said in an interview. Eventually, every user will be required to use that version of the site profile. Zuckerberg, who is now Facebook's CEO, did not attend the event Wednesday. Despite some early opposition, Facebook wants to encourage all developers to adopt the new tools. In characteristic Facebook ambition, Sjogreen added, "We're even more excited about the thousands of apps to come."