Facebook started with a simple premise: you want to hang out where your friends want to hang out. With that simple premise, it now has 800 million active friends. Now Facebook is taking this friendship to the new extreme. It has released a new Timeline feature packed with 60 initial apps.

In the newly released social graph and Timeline, you can know what your friends are doing, and if you are in mood, you can do the same thing.

If your friends are listening to Eminem’s No Apologies, then boom, you can listen to it with them. If your friend is cooking Gobi Paratha using Foodily, then you can cook with your friend.

It’s just not cooking, listening and reading anymore. It’s practically whatever you can do online which has a shareable element to it, can be shared. The decision to share or not-share is still with you. There are 60 popular services spread across 9 categories.

Turntable.fm, Saavn or Rhapsody for music, Washington Post or WSJ for news, Foodily for food, Runkeeper for fitness, and Flixter or Soundcloud for entertainment. Facebook has also included 3 apps – Causes, FundRazr, and Artez Interactive – for social causes.

Your friend just donated $5 for a flood relief through Causes.

Once you see that message, chances are, you might donate, too. That’s the brilliance of Timeline and the Open Graph. Timeline will give a new meaning to going viral. An obscure song can shoot to Billboard’s top chart if a ‘right friend’ is listening to it and also cares to share.

Indian apps

There are currently three Indian apps available on Timeline — two news and one music app — as part of the 60 Facebook apps in the initial launch. These include news apps IBN Live and IN in Hindi. Saavn is a great app to listen to Bollywood music.

IBN Live has claimed that it’s the first Indian app to be on Facebook. Technically, it’s not the first news app from India. There is one more app, the Hindi version of In.com. Sorry IBN but you are not the first app. If 60 apps are released on the same day, and there is one more app in the same category, then you won’t be the first app. But, congratulations on being there, all the same. The title should have been One of the first news app. (But hey, I’m just creating awareness. I’m not pitching for an editor’s job at IBN Live.)

The curious case of Saavn

The music app, Saavn, isn’t tightly integrated with Facebook, though. From the app list on Facebook, clicking on Saavn takes you to the Saavn website and not the Facebook stream itself. Also, there seems to be no message going out on the wall that I’m listening to a particular song. Neither does the Saavn app come into my app basket along with my IBNLive, IN Hindi and Angry Brides. I just don’t see the social element of Saavn’s inclusion in the Facebook apps list.

It’s unfortunate that Facebook’s social graph and the 60 apps did not get the much-needed press exposure it deserves because of Apple’s changing one more industry, yet again. Check out the full list of Facebook apps, find yours and get sharing. One more thing: Facebook shows you which apps are your friends are already using. Sharing starts from there.

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