Improving Facebook for Books, Movies, TV and Fitness

We built Facebook Platform to enable people to capture memories and share experiences through the apps they use. Books, movies, TV and fitness comprise an important part of who people are, so today we're announcing new actions to give people better ways to express those things.

New actions for lifestyle apps

The Open Graph supports a variety of popular activities, like watching videos, and we're adding the following new common actions:

• Fitness: run, walk, bike
• Books: read, rate, quote, want to read
• Movies and TV: rate, want to watch

This improves developers’ ability to publish the types of activities that people want to share. You can learn more about these actions and the associated objects in our documentation for fitness, books, and movies and TV.

More engaging News Feed stories

Following yesterday’s news, we've created beautiful News Feed stories on mobile and web to showcase these actions. We want people who use your apps to be excited about how their stories are presented in News Feed – whether they're sharing a major life moment, like their first marathon, or something smaller, like finishing a book they were reading.

We've worked with a variety of lifestyle app developers to tailor the new actions and News Feed stories to meet common use cases. For example, the new fitness stories dynamically update when someone finishes their workout, and early data shows that average likes per story have increased by more than 2x. As we move more apps to use a common set of actions, we’ll be able to further optimize the performance of these stories and the user experience.

All apps that use these new actions will be reviewed to ensure they meet our quality criteria. Any apps that previously used custom actions to represent this type of sharing will need to move to these new actions by July 10, 2013.

Many of the most popular lifestyle apps have added the ability to share these new actions. These include:

• Fitness: Nike, Cyclemeter, Endomondo, Jawbone UP, Log Your Run, MapMyRun, Runkeeper, Runmeter, Runtastic, SPLIT Multisport GPS, Walkmeter
• Books: Bookshout!, Goodreads, Kobo, Random House Inc.'s BookScout
• Movies and TV: Rotten Tomatoes, Hulu, Flixster, Fandango, Crackle

In the past, Facebook Platform has evolved to support developers building high-quality gaming, media and music experiences. We're excited to begin providing new ways for fitness, books, movies and TV developers to be just as successful.