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Facebook’s Open Graph: The Future of the Semantic Web

Written by Martin Wong on April 21, 2010

Today at the F8 developer conference in San Francisco, Facebook took a huge step towards embracing the semantic web. The new Open Graph API and Protocol announced today may well represent the first serious threat to Google’s dominance of how people find content and navigate the World Wide Web.

In Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote speech, he talked a lot about the social graph and how if you map out the connections between people, you can see where and how we are all connected together. Facebook does a great job of mapping out our friendships but now they want to go further and expand into mapping our other connections: to companies, brands, music, films and any social “objects” we engage with as we navigate the web.

The idea is to “socialize” the web so that we can be more easily connected with content and products that we may find interesting. To facilitate this more social web, Facebook has announced 5  social plugins for use on websites.

Facebook’s 5 New Social Plugins

1. iLike Button – You can now install the iLike button widget (previously this was called the “Fan” button) on your website with a single line of html code. Visitors can “like” your content, your website or your particular brand which automatically shares it with their Facebook stream and can notifies them when you make important updates.
2. Activity Stream – This adds a Facebook stream to your website or blog, which is similar to the Facebook News Feed, but it only shows activity on Facebook related to your website. This looks to be a great plugin, similar to Twitter streams placed on websites, to add life to static websites and show how people are engaging with your content. This can also be installed with a single line of code.
3. Recommendations – This plugin gives suggestions for other content your users might like. It makes recommendations based on contextual-similar content on your website that is popular among all your website’s visitors as well as the user’s personal friends on Facebook.
4. Facebook Connect 2.0 – The Facebook Connect button is now streamlined so that it requires only a single click to login via the button. If you place the Facebook login plugin on your website, it will show photos of all the visitor’s friends who have already joined the website.
5. The Social Bar – This is a toolbar that you can place on your website that integrates the iLike button, the visitor’s friends who like your website and Facebook Chat, directly on your website.

Open Graph Protocol

Using the Open Graph Protocol you can now use meta tag markup to describe and facilitate the sharing of your content. You can use this Open Graph Protocol to tag and describe “any real-world object that is represented on the internet”. Then, when users share the content, the semantic information in the meta tag is used to mark and index that content on Facebook.

In his speech, Zuckerberg used the band Green Day as an example, showing how they are tagged as a punk band from Berkeley, California.

<meta property=”og:title” content=”Green Day” />
<meta property=”og:type” content=”Band” />
<meta property=”og:genre” content=”Punk” />
<meta property=”og:city” content=”Berkeley />
<meta property=”og:url” content=”http://www.greenday.com “/>

You can use this semantic markup for any piece of content that is connected to real-world things: movies, companies, sports teams, celebrities, politicians, restaurants and products. To integrate your content into the social graph using this semantic markup, you just need to add the <meta> tags and the iLike button to your individual web pages. To learn more about the technical details, visit Facebook’s Open Graph Protocol developers page.

Looking Ahead

This new Open Graph API and Protocol marks a huge step toward broadening the semantic web. With over 400 million Facebook users who are collectively now sharing over 25 billions things per month, these new easy-to-use social graph features will only cause these numbers to continue to skyrocket.

While Google’s search empire remains secure for the moment, Facebook’s  announcement today puts them well ahead of Google in developing the semantic web, which many experts call the next frontier of the digital revolution. Their vision for a socialized web, with everyone connected and sharing information through the Facebook platform, represents the biggest challenge yet to Google’s search monopoly.

It will be very interesting to see in the next few years how this battle between Google and Facebook for the future of the web plays out.