At the F8 conference, Facebook unveiled a bold new plan to make the entire Web more social. At the heart of that plan lies a new technology called “Open Graph.”
Open Graph consists of three separate but related elements: publisher plug-ins, semantic markup, and a developer API. The plug-ins allow third-party sites to interact more closely with Facebook, and they include Login with Faces & Facepile, Like Button and Like Box, Activity Feed and Live Stream, and Recommendations. Semantic markup makes it easier for sites to say what is on a page—a book, a movie, music, a sports team, etc.—which also makes it easier to track what users like and dislike. The new API allows sites to access users’ Facebook data. As ReadWriteWeb says, “This new API turns Facebook into a read/write storage of users’ tastes. And not just one user – all Facebook users.”
This lengthy article also considers the implications of this new technology for users, publishers, competitors, Facebook, the semantic Web, and developers.
