Facebook apps can now broadcast your fitness, entertainment habits

Facebook is letting the third-party apps that track some of your lifestyle habits -- exercising, reading, and movie or TV-watching -- post more of your activities to the Timeline.

"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," Facebook engineer Dan Giambalvo wrote in a blog post to app developers.

This means if you use apps like Runkeeper, Goodreads, or Hulu, the apps can post updates specifically related to the activity you've done. For fitness apps, this may mean a post about how far you ran, walked, or biked, or if you just completed a trek. The apps with this function also include Cyclemeter, Endomondo, Jawbone UP, Log Your Run, MapMyRun, Nike, Runmeter, Runtastic, SPLIT Multisport GPS, and Walkmeter.

Giambalvo wrote that these fitness posts automatically update themselves when a workout is completed, and get twice as many "likes," according to Facebook.

For reading apps, like Bookshout, Kobo, or BookScout, friends would be able to see if you read, rate, quote, or want to read a book. And for movie and TV junkies, apps like Rotten Tomatoes, Flixer, Fandango, and Crackle can post when you rate something you've watched or note something you want to watch.

Facebook plans to apply this to more activities and apps. In the past, the company has done the same for gaming apps, which typically post in-game achievements, and music apps, including Spotify, which can post what songs you listen to. All this sharing, Facebook hopes, means more interactions from users, which in turn means more eyeballs for advertisements.