Facebook announced that nearly 3,000 "timeline" apps have launched in the two months since the giant social network unveiled the platform.
During SXSW Facebook and its partners unleashed a whole new crop of timeline apps with entries emerging from Foursquare, Nike, The Onion,Vevo, Fandango, Viddy, Endomondo, RootMusic, Foodspotting, Pose and Votizen.
You can now for example bring your Foursquare "check-ins" to your timeline page. On Vevo the timeline shows video playlists created automatically from artists you've indicated you "liked" within Facebook.
The new RootMusic timeline app lets people mark their favorite songs and bands and the concerts they plan on attending from the Facebook Pages of the performers. Click "favorite" or "going to go" and your intentions are posted on timeline.
I caught up with some of the companies at an event Facebook held in its Austin offices. On the new Fandango app, movie fans can add clips from movies they watch and rate to timeline. "I think movies are inherently social and so now (timeline) amplifies behavior people have always done, talk about movies, go to movies together," says Nicholas Lehman, president of Digital Entertainment & Digital Networks at NBCUniversal, which own Fandango.
The Endomondo fitness app enables runners and bikers to post workout progress (calories burned, distance, etc.) on timeline in real time as they exercise, with live maps of where they're going. "If one of my friends is on my timeline and sees 'hey he's out running and it shows up every minute, he can follow me and go from there, he can send me a pep talk (that's) read live into my headset," says Mads Mikkelsen, Endomondo's vice president for business development. "Those type of tools are available to make sports more fun and more social. The challenge for us now that we're launching timeline integration is to bring all these social aspects of sports and experiences from the Endomondo environment to the Facebook environment."
Alexa Andrzejewski co-founder of the Foodspotting app says that before timeline integration the only thing people with the app shared on Facebook was pictures of favorite food, something less than 90% of active users did. So now with the new app and the Facebook integration, users can indicate that they tried a certain food and that will appear on Timeline as well.