The new verbs include three new fitness actions (run, walk, bike), four new book-related actions (read, rate, quote, want to read), and two new video actions (rate, want to watch) to open graph.

What can you do with Actions?

The new actions help you share what you’re doing in a very precise way and enable apps to share updates for your automatically. (In fact, you may have heard of this first when Facebook announced “frictionless sharing.”)

Connected apps — like a Kobo reader, for instance — use Facebook actions to update Facebook on, not surprisingly, your actions. In the same way, Nike+ can tell your Facebook friends that you’re running, or that you’ve just finished a 10K slog.

That’s cool, but why does Facebook care? And what makes this important?

What can Facebook do with Actions?

For many, perhaps most, status updates, Facebook doesn’t really have a clue what you’re actually doing. You said something like “Visiting my mother-in-law for the first time – wish me luck,” and Facebook can’t really parse through those words to understand it like a human would.

But when you use Facebook actions, Facebook knows what your status update actually means.

That’s because Facebook actions are structured updates that not only provide information on what you’re doing or have done, like any standard status update would, but also provide meta-data about what precisely it is. In other words, since computers are stupid, they have to be first told the message, and second told what it means.

Facebook has called Actions the “building blocks of Open Graph,” and Open Graph is nothing less than an attempt to actually understand you at a deep level … and your friends, and your interactions.

There’s money in them hills

Google monetizes incredibly well because its massively popular search engine has built-in intent: When you’re searching for something, you include keywords about what you want, and Google can determine with fairly high accuracy what your meaning and intent is, and then match it to commercially relevant information.

Aka, ads.

Facebook monetizes poorly because there’s seldom built-in commercial intent in social status updates, and because it’s less clear what they’re actually about.

As VentureBeat’s Jolie O’Dell wrote last year:

Actions are kind of the holy grail of semantic data, defining relation types between people, objects, content, places, businesses, and so much more. If users warm to the idea of Actions, it might also be one of the most valuable and lucrative move Facebook will ever make.

Naturally, Facebook’s messaging around Actions is all consumer-focused: They’ll allow people to “capture memories” and “share experiences” and “express” themselves. And they will.

But they’ll also make Facebook a great deal smarter.

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Today, Facebook announced a new treat for developers: the capability to use something called “flexible sentences” when their apps communicate with Facebook on your behalf.

Already, apps can use fairly descriptive language in Open Graph. For example, RunKeeper can tell the world you ran 15.1 miles; Goodreads can share that you read two books and added Twilight: Breaking Dawn to your bookshelf. But flexible sentences take app communications to a whole new level of specificity.

With flexible sentences, as Facebooker Jiangbo Miao explained today on the company blog, apps can now use better language to describe what in-app actions actually do (e.g., Songkick lets you “track” bands, but what does a “track” really mean? Now, Songkick can post to your profile that you “tracked Def Leppard to get concert alerts”).

Also, devs can use flexible sentences to avoid awkward sentence construction. In the new feature’s documentation, Facebook gives an example for a social hiking app. Steve could hike a specific path called Dead Man’s Trail, and Social Hike could post to his wall, “Steve hiked Dead Man’s Trail on Social Hiking.” But if no path is specified, the app might post, “Steve hiked a hike on Social Hiking.” With flexible sentences, devs will now have more options to smooth out those rough edge cases, such as construction, tenses, and attribution (e.g., “via”/”on”/”in” Social Hiking):

Basically, developers are getting more options and richer syntax for letting their apps programmatically talk to Facebook. The statements apps make on your profile can now be more descriptive, interesting, accurate, and human.

“Most stories will continue to be worded properly without needing to use flexible sentences,” a Facebook spokesperson said. This functionality is only available for custom actions and will not work with built-in actions, which are intended to provide a consistent experience across all instances. If you modify your existing actions, you will need to resubmit your actions for approval via the App Dashboard.

Flexible sentences is available today for developers, and we’re beginning to rollout the new story formats for users. To learn more about working with flexible sentences, please see our documentation.

Facebook first announced Actions, its big plan to bring verbs other than “Like” to the Facebook news feed, back at f8 in September 2011. At that time, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted that the network’s vocabulary was limited and previewed some other activities that would be shared on Facebook in the future — listening to music, reading books, watching TV shows, hiking trails. A lot more than just “liking.”

It’s a small update, but it’s one that will make both developers and grammarians alike a little bit happier.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Less than two weeks after a relaunch featuring deeper ties to Facebook, music video service Vevo is seeing a record number of video views per person and is now netting 3.5 billion total views a month.

Vevo, the independent music video company created in partnership with Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and the Abu Dhabi Media Company, has seen video views per person jump 70 percent and Facebook sharing climb 100 percent since its March 9 relaunch, CEO Rio Caraeff said in a video interview with paidContent.

The video service, which is now attracting 45 billion views a year, also plans to expand beyond the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. to six additional countries in 2012 and is seeing the fastest growth on mobile and tablet devices, Caraeff said.

The new Vevo experience, seen on web, mobile, and television (by way of a new Xbox application), is rich with Facebook-infused personalization features. When you log in via Facebook, for instance, the service scans your Facebook activity to create playlists from shared or “liked” artists and tracks.

It’s a rather brilliant integration that takes advantage of Facebook users’ previous listening actions and provides the easiest way yet to sit back and stream. Of course, since the entire experience exists on top of Facebook’s Open Graph, video viewing behaviors are pushed back to Facebook, creating a powerful, viral loop that Vevo is clearly noticing.

Vevo is just one of many companies feeling the Facebook effect. Pinterest, Viddy, Foodspotting, and several others are all noticing remarkable upticks in activity and new users since releasing applications on Facebook’s new Open Graph platform.

Vevo, according to paidContent, made $150 million in revenue in 2011 and has paid out $100 million in royalties in the last two years. Thirty percent of video consumption in the U.S. is now happening off of YouTube, Caraeff said.

In the wake of Facebook’s implementation of Actions, a new way for third-party applications to get their data into your Timeline, many apps are seeing staggering new growth stats.

Already-popular traffic hounds such as Pinterest, Fab.com, Foodspotting, Pose, and several others are reporting increases in new visitors, new signups, and the time each user spends on the site, all in direct relation to their Facebook Actions.

As a brief refresher, Actions allow apps to publish more detailed information to your Facebook Timeline. Instead of showing that you “Liked” a page or commented on activity, your Timeline might show that you listened to a song, tried a new restaurant dish, or bought an article of clothing. These actions give your friends (and big brands and advertisers) a much more accurate picture of your interests, the things you have, the things you want, and the decisions you’re likely to make in the future.

And since the actions are a lot more interesting and colorful than a simple “Like,” they’re driving curious new eyeballs to the lifestyle apps in question.

For example, Pinterest launched its Actions-packed Timeline tools around a month ago. Since then, the number of Facebook users navigating over to Pinterest has grown by more than 60 percent each day.

Team members from fashion app Pose said they’ve seen daily Internet and mobile signups increase five-times over since they launched Timeline Actions. And design-focused e-commerce site Fab.com has experienced a 50 percent increase in traffic from Facebook since its own Timeline Actions integration.

On the arts and entertainment side of things, art-discovery site Artfinder has experienced a 60 percent jump in time spent on the site by new visitors coming from Facebook.

Food apps Foodspotting and Foodily are also seeing growth directly related to Facebook Actions. Foodspotting, which lets users share the dishes they tried and loved in sweet summaries in the Timeline, saw a threefold increase in visits and activities shared on Facebook. Food and recipe site Foodily saw a fourfold increase in new users.

“These apps have a few things in common,” wrote a Facebook spokesperson in a statement to VentureBeat.

“They’re built around something people care about and identify with, they enable people to share things they want their friends to see, and they provide easy ways to control the social experience.”

While a huge number of these semantically linked verbs, called Actions, are going to be appearing in various places around Facebook and Facebook-connected websites, two Actions might be more commercially significant than the rest: “Want” and “Own.” Because, if you follow the money, these two actions are most closely linked to Facebook’s main source of revenue, its advertising real estate and targeting.

For the past few years, companies have been attempting to make the most, capitalistically speaking, from Facebook’s vast, interconnected social graph. The Open Graph (including Facebook Connect and the now-ubiquitous Like button) further brings brands and products into the social web of people, much to the delight of marketers and e-commerce companies.

Facebook announced major Open Graph changes in the works at its developer conference last year. While Actions were a part of that preview, the company’s first launches around the evolution of Open Graph were all about music — both sharing the music you’re into and listening along with friends.

“This [release] is really heavily about shopping,” said Payvment CEO Christian Taylor, who told us that some Actions announced today might end up be far more important than the already ubiquitous “Like” button.

“Wanting,” “Owning,” & buying on Facebook

Payvment is one of the leading enablers of “f-commerce,” or retail and commerce occurring on and around Facebook. This company developed with Facebook and has been using “Want” and “Own” buttons for several months.

In the image on the left, you can see Payvment’s buttons in action.

“The Open Graph has been around for two years, but it was really based on the Like button, which never really worked for shopping,” Taylor told VentureBeat in an interview yesterday.

“It really doesn’t mean anything to anybody. So to help people understand their relationship to product, we created a Want button… and an Own button.”

When users click the “Want” and “Own” buttons, it triggers Facebook to update dynamic lists related to those terms. For the “Want” button, the result is a sort of real-time wishlist; the “Own” button acts almost as a catalog tool for a digital closet that’s linked to a real-world collection of items. Several other shopping and fashion apps are using similar Actions, as well, and all to the same general effect.

These buttons are very obviously linked to reality-based purchasing intention and purchase patterns — not just what people are idly talking about on the Internet, but what they’ve actually put down money for in the recent past and what their acquisitive aspirations are.

Understanding the semantic web of information between people and the things they buy can give analysts and marketers deep information on relationships between people and purchases. That information can be used to better target advertising and influence consumers’ decisions, opinions, aspirations, and attitudes.

Best of all for Payvment and Facebook merchants and brands, Taylor said, consumers are actually using the buttons.

“In our testing, more people used it than we ever thought would,” he said. “We’ve been testing this for the past two months. It shocked us, how many people went around collecting the things they love and have.”

As consumers click around the web, indicating what they want and own, their Facebook profiles are updated accordingly — not in the public-facing Timeline, but in deep-dive sections of the profile. “You get to see what other people’s interests are, what they own,” said Taylor.

Is Facebook an Amazon challenger?

We asked Taylor if he thought Facebook was positioning itself to take on Amazon, which also has wishlists and has been attempting to coordinate group and social activity around buying and product discovery.

“If you think about Amazon’s wishlist, it’s not very social,” Taylor said.

“["Want" and "Own" features] really are about sharing with your friends… It’s less about building lists and more about sharing, and really finding other people that aren’t connected to you but that have the same interests as you that you can interact with.”

Taylor also said that the process of browsing through friends’ owned and wanted items would create a uniquely social way to find out about new products, content, and more.

“There’s no discovery mechanism [with Amazon's wishlist]. These new buttons are really going to drive discovery, just like Spotify did with music.”

We’ll be keeping an eye on how people use these buttons and many other Facebook Actions over the coming weeks and months — and, perhaps even more importantly, how marketers and e-commerce companies use that information to sell, sell, sell.

At a private event in San Francisco Wednesday night, the social network announced a slew of new partners are using Actions, the Facebook feature that will let developers make just about any verb a semantically cross-indexed link.

What does all that mean? Let’s take a simple example as an illustration.

Let’s suppose you just bought a Juicy Couture velour tracksuit. In days of yore, you might have hopped onto Facebook and told all your friends in a status update, “I am now the proud owner of a Juicy Couture tracksuit! It’s so blingy; I love it.”

In the new world of Facebook Actions, you would simply click an “Own” button next to the tracksuit you bought on a Facebook partner site. On related parts of your Facebook profile, the app you used to show you “own” the tracksuit would add that item to a list featuring other purchases you’ve made. Other Facebook-linked apps you use might show other lists — for example, clothes you’ve worn, products you want, books you’ve read, movies you’ve reviewed — anything you’ve talked about on the network or on Facebook-connected sites around the web.

Actions are kind of the Holy Grail of semantic data, defining relation types between people, objects, content, places, businesses, and so much more. If users warm to the idea of Actions, it might also be one of the most valuable and lucrative move Facebook will ever make.

All your apps, all your stories, all on Facebook

Facebook’s initial partners for the Actions launch.

More than 60 partners are working with Facebook to create and roll out Actions for this initial launch. These partners are in verticals from food to fitness to travel and beyond. Companies such as Pinterest, Airbnb, Pose, RottenTomatoes, Runkeeper, and Foodspotting will be among the initial partners.

If you’re interested, you can start adding apps right now. Facebook has a video at that link explaining how the apps will interact with your Timeline.

And starting today, any application that wants to integrate with Facebook Actions and Timelines will be approved in the coming weeks and months.

Ideally, said Facebook exec Carl Sjogreen at tonight’s event, any app you find meaningful will be able to connect to Facebook in a way that’s more meaningful than just clicking a “Like” button or automating shares from that app to your Facebook wall — and that all your stories will be told, not through a universe of apps, but universally on Facebook and with a structured context.

All activities from a given app will be summed up at the end of the month — for example, your “wanted” and “spotted” items on Foodspotting would appear in a visual graph together on each month in your Timeline.

“The call to developers is to start your engines,” Sjogreen concluded. “We’re excited to see what you’re going to build.”

Evolving beyond “Likes”

We recently spoke with Payvment CEO Christian Taylor, who told us Actions have the potential to be far more important than the already ubiquitous “Like” button.

As one of the leading enablers of “f-commerce,” or retail and commerce occurring on and around Facebook, Payvment has been using “Want” and “Own” buttons linked to the Facebook social graph. In the image on the left, you can see Payvment’s buttons in action.

“The Open Graph has been around for two years, but it was really based on the Like button, which never really worked,” said Taylor. “It really doesn’t mean anything to anybody.”

Actions, he continued to say, would help to bring even more opportunities to learn about content and products to Facebook users. “These new buttons are really going to drive discovery, just like Spotify did with music.”

At Facebook’s f8 developer conference last year, when Actions were first revealed, even Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted that “Like” buttons were limited.

“We’re helping to define a new language for how people connect,” Zukcerberg said at that time. “When we started, the vocabulary was limited” to simple, inexpressive “Likes.”

So starting now, instead of “liking” a book, you can tell friends you “Read” it through Facebook’s new vocabulary of Actions. But you’re not just telling your friends; you’re telling Facebook and Facebook’s vast network of advertisers and brands.

The more businesses large and small are able to understand the relationships between us consumers and the products we consume (and the sentiments we express around those interactions and relationships), the more targeted and effective they can make their marketing. It’s only as insidious as capitalism itself, and this type of intelligence is the kind of thing that could quickly bring online advertising to its evolutionary apex — at least for now.

“The company will collect more data than ever, if you allow it, and it will offer you enticements to share that data,” wrote VentureBeat’s Dean Takahashi in an op-ed back when Actions was first previewed.

“[Facebook] can, for instance, take your information and mine it for useful nuggets. It can give you back statistical information about your behavior that you didn’t know about… If there was any doubt that Facebook is a data mining company with a lot of ‘big data,’ that ended today.”

Activity without annoyance

The Ticker on the Facebook homepage. Actions will appear here. Rolling over Ticker activity will trigger a flyout with more information and interactions.

However, from the user’s perspective, one of the best parts about Actions is that you can use them without incessantly oversharing to your friends.

When you share a post or update your status on Facebook, it will appear in your friends’ news feeds. But when you have an Action coming from the Open Graph (i.e., from a site that exists outside Facebook but that uses Facebook Connect in some way), that activity will only appear in the Ticker and on your own Timeline.

(The Ticker is a lightweight, real-time stream of activity that shows up on the right side of the Facebook homepage. It showcases various minutiae from your friends, from Actions to songs they’re listening to and beyond.)

Many Actions partners will offer granular settings to give you control over what you share. For example, design-centric flash-sale site Fab.com’s “Bought” actions are opt-in. Like the Actions turned on but don’t want to share a particular purchase with your friends? Mark it as a gift to hide it. Don’t worry about embarrassing buys; all Fab.com “adult” items are hidden by default.

“You may not want your mom to know you just bought a sexy piece of lingerie, but you can change that,” said a Fab.com spokesperson. “We want to make sure our customers are as comfortable as possible with sharing.”

For Actions coming into Facebook from outside apps, users won’t get prompts for each Action they take; those blips on the radar will simply appear on the Ticker then vanish — mostly. Since this real-time stream generates a lot of noise with very little signal, the Actions will also be archived on users’ Facebook profiles, where deeper digging will unearth various kinds of actions he or she has taken in the past.

Facebook’s redesign of profile pages in to Timelines has made this separation of high-level and low-level information possible and easy to navigate.

“We had to figure out the interactions that people wanted to have, the social construction,” said Facebook design chief Sam Lessin in a recent interview with VentureBeat about the Timeline design.

“It’s designed very differently from News Feed,” he continued, noting that while the elements of the Timeline you can see now are very much related to what’s going on in your life day by day and month by month, other sections of the profile are tailor-made for deeper digging.

As Facebook executive Bret Taylor explained it, with the addition of Actions to Facebook profiles, “You can see everything you have ever done in any app.”

Top image courtesy of Jolie O’Dell.