Social Freedom

Open Graph now supports articles, kinda

Thu, 29 Apr 2010 11:49:00 -0700

When Facebook announced its Open Graph protocol during its F8 gala last week, most traditional news content was not welcome to the party, but that quietly changed a few days ago.

To be part of the "open" graph, a social object must have a title, image, URL, site name and type. But only a handful of Facebook-chosen types are supported. Preceding a list of supported types, Facebook notes that "if your URL is a piece of content - such as a news article, photo, video, or similar - you should not include the og:type property." They explain their logic in a best practice listed lower on that page:

But the protocol is clearly a living document."Note that the Open Graph protocol is currently designed to support real-life objects." It looks like that design might have changed a few days ago.

On April 26, in a mailing list for the Open Graph developers, Facebook Senior Open Programs Manager David Recordon announced that he added the "article" type to opengraphprotocol.org, which is where Open Graph's definitions are stored.

Start tagging

So what should news organizations do? Assuming that they are already working on adding Open Graph elements to their pages, they should code articles so that services like Facebook can properly identify them as articles.

Facebook impact

How will this impact how articles appear on Facebook? Well, that's still unclear. You see, Facebook is under no obligation to change the way it displays information when elements are added to the Open Graph protocol (an open standard), just as they don't have to change anything if a new tag is added to the HTML language.

This is open

How did this development happen just one week after the protocol was announced? Say what you might about the openness of Open Graph, but this particular change was the product of a very open discussion.

On the afternoon that Facebook's Open Graph was announced, MySpace's Monica Keller welcomed people to a Google group established for Open Graph developers.

Two days after the launch, the Associated Press' Jonathan Malek asked if the type "news" or "article" could be added to Open Graph. Facebook's Recordon agreed with Malek's suggestion. He replied that "Facebook will implement support for article" and asked if anyone else would support it.

Malek felt confident that the AP could implement the "article" type and Huffington Post developer Ben Regenspan supported the idea. Twenty-nine minutes after Regenspan's endorsement, Malek sent out a message that the site was updated and "I'll let you know once Facebook supports it as well."

What do you think? Will this change anything about the way you publish, read or share news?

Social Freedom

Open Graph now supports articles, kinda

Start tagging

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