Automaker Lexus is using Facebook’s timeline as the engine behind Points of No Return, a Facebook application that promotes its upcoming 2013 Lexus GS.

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Just upgraded: The timeline-ready application Foodspotting, which bills itself as a visual guide to food that focuses on individual dishes rather than on restaurants.

Foodspotting had appeared on the list of 60 different applications in Facebook’s open graph actions announcement almost two weeks ago, and now the mobile application has entered its third release on iPhone and Android.

New features in the upgrade include:

• The ability to bookmark dishes you want to try and hide ones you don’t;
• Single-click options to show whether you loved a dish, or tried it but didn’t love it, and whether you want to try it.
• An activity feed showing friends’ likes and activity;
• Publication of your actions onto your own timeline and Facebook news feeds, plus
• Recommendations from professional restaurant reviewers.

Combining professional recommendations with feeback from one’s own friends certainly makes Foodspotting seem more palatable than Yelp. Said predecessor has essentially lost its credibility for reviews of restaurants, which now have the ability to pay to prioritize only the best posts.

The company behind Foodspotting has put together a cute video about the upgrade, and we’ve embedded the footage below. Let us know what you think of it.

Social Ads Tool addressed the new action items available to advertisers via Facebook’s open graph with its launch of Action Specs targeting.

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We asked Wade Gerten, chief executive officer of 8thBridge, about its ticketing application developed in partnership with Ticketmaster for timeline. Read the rest of this entry »

Extra! Extra! Gannett’s national newspaper jumped aboard the Facebook open graph applications bandwagon with the launch of USA Today + Me.

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Facebook has been evolving into more of an operating system than a standalone website, but this hasn’t suddenly happened overnight.

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The right-hand side of timeline will soon be the official home for the action-oriented applications that make use of variations on the like button.

As of this writing, the promised layout has yet to materialize on Facebook, so we’re still seeing wall posts showing up in both columns of the timeline.

But soon, the left side will effectively be the wall, and the right side will show what you’re doing in different applications.

The demos we watched last night suggest that this new right-hand column will have a chronological organization, just like the left side has.

Curating this side of the timeline will become a matter of deciding what to include and what to hide from view.

Moving your mouse over to the upper right-hand corner of each item on the timeline makes visible two icons:

• A star, which lets you choose to hide or highlight a timeline post; and
• A  pencil icon,which when clicked upon pulls down a longer menu of items. This includes hide the item, delete it, mark the item as spam, add a location or time to it.

Furthermore, you’ll want to go into the privacy settings in the upper right-hand corner of your screen and adjust how much of your activity in each application you want to go out to news feeds.

Click the little down arrow in the uppermost right-hand corner of the page, then click on “edit settings” beneath and to the right of “apps and websites.”

Then on the ensuing page, click the box labeled “edit settings” next to the column of apps you use, and then click on the next page click “edit” next to each app to adjust each one.

Today 60 companies have unveiled open graph applications upgraded to populate the right-hand column of the timeline on Facebook.

Carl Sjogreen, director of platform products at Facebook, said that the social network has streamlined the process for submitting and obtaining approval of new open graph actions, which are variations on the like plugin.

The 60 applications unveiled today include add to the open graph such actions as “want,” “buy,” “taste,” “love,” and “spot.”

That said, the 60 are largely upgrades of apps that have previously existed on Facebook before the advent of timeline and the revamped open graph, said Ethan Beard, director of platform partnerships.

The apps all publish a user’s activity to Facebook upon being granted permission to do so.

The 60 apps unveiled tonight travel, food and wine, fashion and retail, fitness, entertainment (including games), charity, fitness, entertainment, games, charitable donations, job searches, education, two books, ticketing, art, application discovery and cars.

The full list of upgraded apps unveiled tonight is:

Travel

* Gogobot
* Airbnb
* TripAdvisor
* Wipolo
* Where I’ve Been

Food and Wine

* Foodspotting
* Cookpad
* Snooth (wine)
* Urbanspoon
* Yummly
* Foodily

Shopping and Fashion

* Pose
* Pinterest
* Polyvore
* Oodle
* Fab.com
* eBay
* Giftrocket
* Payvment
* Livingsocial

Fitness

* MapMyRun
* Runkeeper

Entertainment

* Rotten Tomatoes
* Dailymotion (French video site)
* Cinemur (French video site)
* Metacafe (videos)
* Ford (game)
* Wooga (Bubble Island, Diamond Dash)
* OMGPOP (Draw My Thing)
* Zynga (Words with Friends, Castleville

Giving

* Causes
* Fundrazr
* Artez.com

Job Search

* BranchOut
* Monster

Photo And Video Sharing

* Color

Education

* Courserank
* Grockit

Books

* Goodreads
* Kobo

Ticketing

* StubHub
* Ticketmaster
* Ticketfly
* ScoreBig

App Discovery

* Appsfire

Art

* Artfinder

Cars

* Autotrader

Location

* Foursquare

The announcement has a decidedly more relaxed atmosphere than what the social network typically puts on for the press. Facebook media events usually take place earlier in the day and have more structure than this what we’re seeing here, where we’re seated in the dark basement lounge of 25 Lusk.

Facebook will most likely never develop a search engine of its own to compete with Google, but that doesn’t mean the social network can’t carve out its niche in the search sector.

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Facebook has scheduled a press-only event tomorrow evening, and it could focus on open graph actions.

Open graph actions are variations on Facebook’s iconic like plugin, frictionlessly and continuously sharing onto Facebook activity from third-party applications that users have okayed.

Read and listen have already become the most prevalent types of the new open-graph action applications populating Facebook news feeds — to the extent that many people have complained about the quantity or at least hidden these updates.

The company has asked developers of open graph applications to include the ability for users to opt out in order to mitigate privacy concerns and placate those who complain about the large quantity of updates the read and listen apps tend to unleash into news feeds. We hope that a crystalization of this into policy might be part of tomorrow evening’s press event.

The event may also include additional buttons along the lines of the “listen with” button that began to appear in the ticker and news feed last week.

Readers, can you wager a guess as to what the company might announce tomorrow?