Looking through the projects Facebook has on github today, I discovered two that illustrate the platform’s new action-oriented approach of posting to people’s Timelines: shoppe and Social-Cafe-Sample.

shoppe is described as a “Sample E-Commerce App” (written for node.js) that:

Highlights use of custom open graph to share purchases and coupon redemptions back to your friends.

Buying a product generates a “purchased” story. If you enter in a working coupon code, a “redeem” coupon story is also generated.

This illustrates a scenario in which a user would buy a car part through the application, and post messages back to their Timeline (and thus potentially their friend’s feeds) describing both the purchase and their use of the coupon.

Social-Cafe-Sample is a similar app written in PHP, “showing how to publish custom actions using the Facebook PHP SDK”, with the following objects and actions:

• Beverage. This object should contain a custom ‘category’ property that points to a BeverageType
  • Three instances of Beverage – Cafe Latte, Iced Mocha, and Earl Grey Tea.
• BeverageCategory
  • Three instances of BeverageCategory – coffee, tea, and soda
• Drink Action, which relates to a Beverage

If the user clicks on an Iced Mocha, code in the app will publish a story to the users activity stream saying, “You are enjoying a ‘Iced Mocha’”. This app is up and running as a demo at http://social-cafe.herokuapp.com/ however it doesn’t appear to publish to the stream correctly yet, possibly because the new stream publishing mechanisms aren’t fully functional as of this writing.

What these examples show is that the new changes to Facebook will give more accurate context to people’s interactions with the digital edges of the world around them. If it catches on, this kind of expanded context will help marketers better connect their messages to people, and better spread their brand message among their potential customers.

For the uber-connected and hyper-sharing folks, in the near future it won’t just be about checking in to the location of the airport, it will be about “boarding” the “plane” then at their destination, “arriving” at the “gate”.  While this might seem like a lot of granular information, it could also be very useful for the people with the right filters in place who want to know that information.