The Open Graph protocolUnderstanding the design decisions

WWW Conference !"#"April !$th, !"#"David Recordon

The product experience

Design goals

Useful to others beyond Facebook.

Copy and paste.

Simple markup. Simple schema.

What’s needed?

! What is the user liking?

" A clean page title

# An image

$ A canonical URL

!) What is the user likingBased off of the most popular categories for Facebook Pages.

▪ Activities

▪ Businesses

▪ Groups

▪ Organizations

▪ People

▪ Places

▪ Products and Entertainment

▪ Websites

") A clean page titleSearch Engine Optimization has caused all sorts of stuff to be crammed into the <title> tag.

▪ “The Semantic Web & THE POWER OF PULL | Blog Archive | The Facebook Open Graph, Part I”

▪ “A New Data Model –%Facebook Developer Blog”

▪ “W&C Track @ WWW!"#", Raleigh, NC, USA ; !$-&" April !"#"”

▪ “Open Graph Protocol | Google Groups”

#) A canonical URLWe wanted to use link-rel canonical.

▪ Major publishers were concerned that adding link-rel canonical would negatively impact their ranking within search engines.

A simple example

What’s desired?

% A short description

& A site name (for collections of pages)

' Location information

( Contact information

$) A short descriptionA simple schema.

▪ Not respecting Don’t Repeat Yourself.

▪ Optimized for a consistent schema versus reuse of existing meta tags.

▪ One namespace. One prefix.▪ One HTML tag attribute (“property”)

What we didn’t wantBut tried.

Too complex!

%) Location information

▪ Couldn’t find a – simple – location markup specification.

▪ Reused the property names from the Microformat hCard

▪ Fully expect this information to be expressed within the page body versus the head.

▪ RDFa gives us a consistent syntax for both cases.

Adoption

AdoptionSeven days later!

▪ Hosted services

▪ og:it - simple metadata extractor to HTML▪ OpenGraph.in - simple metadata extractor to HTML and JSON▪ Multiple RDF parsers now understand the Open Graph protocol▪ Open Graph protocol to JSON convertor for testing

▪ Open Source libraries for Java, Perl, PHP, and Ruby

▪ WordPress plugin for easy publishing

http://opengraphprotocol.org/#implementations

Thanks! Questions?http://opengraphprotocol.org/davidrecordon@facebook.com