Notes from the Facebook Open Graph Developer Day in Austin on November 2, 2011

Spent a productive day listening to Facebook presentations around the changes and improvements to Open Graph that were announced at f8 2011. Facebook is really pushing for the vision of the Semantic Web that has been around for years, using their Open Graph syntax. Really interesting to see how they are working with nouns, verbs, and aggregations - the new Facebook Timeline is a perfect fit for my EveryMarathon marathon calendar app.

Much of the presentation was targeted to information I’d already seen after setting up Open Graph for marathons, but it was nice to see what Facebook was letting app developers do with Aggregations and Achievements.

Improved authentication dialog:

• Show the users what Timeline aggregations they’ll be doing
• Find conversion percentages based on which actions you ask to allow

Aggregations:

Can show min or max of items in the array - can also pluralize so, “Jeff has finished 1 marathon” or “Jeff has finished 55 marathons”

Facebook for Mobile:

• Bookmarks go to mobile web site from m.facebook.com, native apps on iOS and Android - configure in your app settings under Native Mobile Apps
• Open Graph works with both
• Should be able to publish Open Graph actions to timelines that then point to an existing mobile app or mobile web site.

Next Steps for Mobile Apps:

• Integrate Single Sign On into native app
• Create a mobile web app
• Can use Facebook plugin for Phone Gap for mobile web apps
• Configure mobile web URL in the developer app
• Build in your social components

Cloud Services

• Facebook set this up so that you can publish your Open Graph data on a server so their crawlers can access it