Apps More Prominent On Redesigned Facebook Timeline

Facebook has announced an update to the timeline, with bigger and better app placement, improved navigation and streamlined tools for connecting with Open Graph. The About section has also been redesigned to help users express more about what matters to them – their interests and activities.

The redesigned timeline is identical to the one tested in New Zealand earlier this month, but the improvements to the apps in the About tab have not been seen before. The new asymmetrical timeline places all the user’s notifications and posts into one larger column on the right, with everything else – About, Friends, Photos, etcetera – in a smaller column on the left. Apps are afforded more space on the new timeline page, with users given the ability to feature their preferred applications in distinct sections.

Users can also select apps to be featured in the About tab, just as they are on the left of the timeline. People can adorn the About page with thumbnails of their favourite books, movies, songs, films, hobbies and television shows, or they can share this information from the apps they use. For example, users could devote a section to music they listen to on Spotify, to shows they watch on Netflix, or to the books they read on Goodreads.


Specific apps can also be added as standalone sections on the timeline or in the About tab. Each section can then be separated into subsections, depending on the user’s relationship with the content. The screenshot of the “Books” box on the Facebook Developers page, for instance, has three subsections: “Read”, “Want to Read” and “Likes”. A section devoted to the user’s Instagram feed, meanwhile, is separated into “My Photos” and “Photos I Like”.

Users can interact with the content in their friends’ app sections. For example, if they see a movie they want to see in a friend’s “Watched” movies subsection, they can hover over the thumbnail until a plus sign appears in the top right-hand corner. Clicking on the plus sign will reveal a drop down menu, from which users can either choose to add the movie to their own “Watched”, “Want to Watch” or “Likes” subsection – in this case “Want to Watch”.

The update also gives users more control over which apps appear on their Facebook profile page, and in what order, says Jeff Huang in the announcement post:

To simplify how apps are displayed on timeline, we’re replacing aggregations with app sections. Previously, only top-ranked Open Graph stories and aggregations would appear on timeline. Now, when someone adds an app section, it will appear in the same place until they edit the order or visibility.

Developers are encouraged to promote their apps “by linking to it on web or invoking it on mobile”. Apps can be added as sections after installation by clicking on the “Add to Profile” button on the app section page.


The redesign also means more tools for app developers. Developers will now be able to create “Collections”, which will appear in an Open Graph search or on a users timeline if they opt in. There are three distinct layouts for collections: List, Gallery and Map. Just like actions, all collections require approval.

These updates will be introduced to all users and developers over the coming weeks.

What do you think of the new app-focused profile page?

Pinterest Launches Onsite Analytics Service

Social pinboard site Pinterest has launched an onsite analytics service, allowing businesses with Pinterest pages to measure the success and impact of their pins and pinboards. The service also features statistics which measure how many people navigate from Pinterest to the company’s website. The service is free to users with verified websites.

With the analytics, company’s can view information concerning the number of repins they have from their site, the number of people who have seen these pins and how many have visited their website from Pinterest.

Pinterest also displays a selection of the company’s most repinned, most clicked, and most recent pins, giving them a better idea of what is proving popular with other users. Pinterest software engineer Tao Tao gives an example in the announcement post on the Pinterest blog:

For example, if you have a travel blog, you’ll be able to see whether people are pinning your ski vacation posts or beach vacation posts more.

With the new analytics service, businesses can monitor the success of certain pins and tweak their pinboards to get the best impact and the most impressions.

The picture sharing site only had about 20 employees last year, but its astronomic rise in popularity has seen the company grow their ranks to 100 plus, forcing them to move to a 58,000-square-foot office space in San Francisco.

Now, after a year of growth, Pinterest is “building foundations to monetize", founder Ben Silbermann told the Wall Street Journal in February. The analytics service is a step towards bringing in revenue, both advertising and investment, to raise a round of financing at a $2 billion to $2.5 billion valuation.

What do you think of Pinterest’s new analytics service?

SimpleWash, the Easiest Way to Clean Up Your Facebook Page

Whether you're job searching or have a pending friend request from your boss, it's a good idea to clean up your social media profiles every once in a while. After all, even if you're pretty militant about what gets posted publicly, things can slip through the cracks (i.e., that Throwback Thursday photo from freshman year you didn't realize you were tagged in). But, let's face it, you don't always have time to comb through your profiles to find this potentially questionable content.

That's why we were stoked to find SimpleWash, a new app designed to quickly make your profiles squeaky clean. It scans all the content on your Facebook profile — including comments by other people on photos or posts — and detects keywords that might be associated with things you don't want a potential employer seeing (drugs, alcohol, profanities, and the like).

You can browse through all of the flagged content, click on anything you want to remove, and be transferred directly to the post on Facebook, where you can delete or hide it. An even more helpful feature: You can run custom searches to make sure you've never voiced any negative opinions about the company you're about to interview with (i.e., "Thanks for the 6-hour delay, United. #lame").

Not every post SimpleWash picks up will be something you want to remove (i.e., when I ran it, "crack me up" often got picked up as a potential drug reference), but it's a good way to quickly review the messages you're sending to the world.

Oh, but SimpleWash only detects words. So for now, you'll still have to filter out those old college party photos on your own.

Get SimpleWash for Facebook and Twitter. The Twitter version is currently in Beta, but if you're desperate to clean up your feed, just shoot the company a tweet.

Photo via iStockphoto, Kizilkayaphotos