How to Programmatically Administer Off-Facebook Pages with the Open Graph API
With the Open Graph protocol that Facebook announced at last week’s f8 conference, any URL can now be treated just like a Facebook Page. After you mark up your site with the right metadata and encourage users to start Liking your site, you can then publish updates to their Facebook News Feed just like as if your website were an on-Facebook.com Page.
But a good question is: exactly how does a website publish to the Facebook News Feed when it doesn’t exist as a Facebook Page in the first place? Well, the answer is two-fold:
1) First, Facebook said last week that all websites that mark themselves up with the right Open Graph metadata and <fb:admins> tag will actually get an admin interface just like that of Facebook Pages, from which they can publish status updates to fans. At that point, you’d simply have to head over to Facebook to publish status updates.
2) Second, Facebook has also made available a way to associate your Open Graph-enabled site with a Facebook application. By adding the following line to your pages, Facebook will connect your site to an application ID:
<meta property="fb:app_id" content="1234567"/>
Then you’ll need to get the Facebook ID for your page from its canonical URL:
curl 'https://graph.facebook.com/?ids=http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117500/'
Once you have that ID for your URL, you can publish to users’ streams programmatically using the stream.publish API (though Facebook says a new method is coming “very shortly”).
Ultimately, Facebook hopes that by getting a lot of sites to adopt the Open Graph protocol, it can drive more engagement for publishers by getting them to adopt the News Feed as a more important form of user communication. If it succeeds, Facebook would then become an even more important layer of communications infrastructure as it serves more sites around the web in the same way that it has traditionally just served “Pages” on Facebook.com.
April 29th, 2010 at 8:38 am
In my testing, the site shows up as a new page in your Pages admin section after you include an fb:admins meta tag in the index page for the domain… I’ve already done that and looked at the admin interface a few times.
April 29th, 2010 at 8:40 am
Thanks for letting us know theharmonyguy, we just updated slightly as well.
April 29th, 2010 at 8:43 am
As the harmonyguy says it is working now. Take a look at my header:
Then you can see more at http://www.hosting.cz/2010/04/libi-se-vam-tlacitko-like-od-facebooku-dejte-si-ho-na-stranky/. It is in Czech but you get the idea from screenshots.
April 29th, 2010 at 8:46 am
Oh, the header disappeared, so trying to paste it once again. Pls note you have to include property=”fb:admins” content=”admin user FB ID”
<html xmlns:og="http://opengraphprotocol.org/schema/" xmlns:fb="http://www.facebook.com/2008/fbml"><head>
<meta property="og:title" content="Co je právě in?"/>
<meta property="og:type" content="website"/>
<meta property="og:url" content="http://www.jein.cz/"/>
<meta property="og:image" content="http://www.jein.cz/images/jein.png"/>
<meta property="fb:admins" content="669384918"/>
<meta property="og:description" content="Co je právě in na českém internetu aneb co se líbí českým uživatelům Facebooku."/>
<meta property="og:email" content="jan.horna@gmail.com"/>
April 29th, 2010 at 8:50 am
So… which method of customer engagement and relationship building is better from an entire SITE perspective. I get that the new OGP-based Like is similar to a Digg when promoting objects within a site like articles, movies, people, songs, blog posts, etc, but should OGP-based Like change your “Fan Engagement” Strategy for your entire SITE Brand?
Should you switch from Fan Page promotion to the OGP-based “Like” approach? Should you continue to encourage your visitors to become fans of your fan page or simply Like your site?
The Like Box has the option of including your Fan Page ID while the Like Button only has the option of including a non-Facebook URL. You can implement both on your site, but one is focused on building your Fan Page and the other is centered around making your entire site (or at least your home page) a new object altogether.
I’d love to get more insight from other readers.
April 29th, 2010 at 2:11 pm
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May 1st, 2010 at 6:29 pm
[...] How to Programmatically Administer Off-Facebook Pages with the Open Graph API | Inside Facebook [...]
May 2nd, 2010 at 4:28 am
So if I add my band to the Graph, set my personal FB profile as admin will my personal status updates be pushed to the news stream of those people that have ‘liked’ my website?
May 4th, 2010 at 5:22 am
[...] How to Programmatically Administer Off-Facebook Pages with the Open Graph API (insidefacebook.com) [...]
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