Bangalore: Facebook is introducing a set of brand new ‘Open Graph Applications’ from various developers that trace your activities outside Facebook and post it inside the site, only with your permission.

So if a user is watching a movie or reading a news article in the web, the activity will be shared with friends, say “Mark listened to Green Day on Spotify” so that they can also join. The shared content will be posted in Timeline, a feature made available last year for creating visual record of a person’s activities over the years. All this will happen only with users opt-in to share from a site. Once they opt in, all their activities on that site will be shared.  

Facebook is planning to make the Timeline design a standard feature since Open Graph application work only with Timeline. Currently it is available as an opt-in feature. With Open graph and Timeline, a person’s whole life, in and out of Facebook can be viewed as a visual story line.

The feature which was announced at Facebook’s f8 conference last year is currently available for Spotify and Washington Post Social reader.  Facebook announced in last December that it will start approving Open Graph from other developers this January. It insisted developers in making 'actions' that are “simple, genuine and non-abusive” like “read, listen and watch.”

With lots of developers in the queue, this may be Facebook's last public guidance on the subject, before it files to go public in the first quarter of this year.