Open Graph Concepts

Open Graph Overview

At Facebook's core is the social graph: people and the connections they have to everything they care about. When people use Facebook, they share their stories. These stories bring people closer together and help build relationships online and in the real world.
When people use apps online or on their mobile devices, they create even more stories: the music they listen to, the movies they see, the television programs they watch, the styles they love, the routes they jog, and so on.
Apps that connect to the Facebook Open Graph enable people to share their stories with their friends. When friends see these stories, they have an opportunity to download or engage with the app, thereby driving distribution of the app itself.

How Open Graph Works

After a person adds your app to their Timeline or downloads an app that integrates with Open Graph, app specific actions are shared on Facebook via the Open Graph. As your app becomes an important part of how people express themselves, these actions are more prominently displayed throughout Timeline, News Feed and Ticker. This enables your app to become a key part of the Facebook experience for people and their friends.

Building an Open Graph App

The Open Graph allows apps to model a person's activities based on actions and objects. A running app may define the ability to “run” (action) a “route” (object). A reading app may define the ability to “read” (action) a “book” (object). A recipe app may define the ability to “cook” (action) a “recipe” (object). Actions are verbs that people perform in your app. Objects define nouns that the actions apply to.
We created sets of actions and objects for common use cases (we call these "built-in actions" and "built-in objects") and a tool for you to create your own custom actions and objects. As people engage with your app, social activities are published to Facebook that connect the person with your objects, via your actions.
In practice, actions are published through Facebook, while objects are typically (though, not always) web pages that you host and that contain special meta tags. For example, the "pin" action from Pinterest refers to a web page (the "object") hosted on the Pinterest website.

Benefits of Using Open Graph

With the Open Graph, your app becomes a part of a person's identity and social graph. Through a single API, you can deeply integrate into key points of distribution on Facebook such as Timeline, News Feed, Ticker and App Tabs. You’ll be able to recruit more people to your app and create a deep, persistent connection between them and your app.

Learn More

The Open Graph documentation is organized into three sections:

• Key Concepts will give you background on what Open Graph is, how to use it, the benefits you will likely derive from doing so, and examples of companies like yours that have used it successfully.
• Technical Guides (or How-Tos) will walk you through the technical steps, including code, that will show you how to build Open Graph apps and use Open Graph features.

Results

Companies just like yours have integrated with Open Graph and seen significant increases in downloads and engagement.

Open Graph Actions

Actions

Actions are the high-level "interactions" users can perform in your app.

Types

Built-in

Facebook has defined a set of actions that can be used without any further customization on your part.

• Follow
• Like
• Listen
• Read
• Watch

Custom Actions

You have the ability to create your own actions and define all properties of those actions. This gives you the ultimate flexibility when modeling Open Graph actions that seamlessly replicate what your user's are doing on your site.

Privacy Model

User Choice
Actions follow the privacy model of the user. User's can decide to share the actions they've taken on your app with "Everyone", "Friends", or keep them private to themselves. When configuring your action, as the developer, you have the ability to set a default privacy level, however, the user can choose to override that default privacy level with any privacy level that's more restricted. The user can NOT choose a privacy level that's more open, which might be important if you are building an app where you need to ensure a minimum level of privacy.

Examples

You may have seen Open Graph actions on your Timeline. Here are examples of the Open Graph actions ("pin") generated by Pinterest. The first example is how a Pinterest action is displayed in another person's News Feed:

The second example is how a Pinterest action is aggregated in a person's Timeline:

 

Open Graph Objects

Objects

Objects represent "entities" that users can act on in your app. Most Open Graph objects are web pages hosted on a public website, with Open Graph-specific meta tags embedded within the page. Facebook routinely scrapes these web pages, extracting the data contained in the meta tags in order to generate stories that it displays on peoples' News Feeds and Timelines.
Previously, users were able to connect to objects in your app via the like action. Now, you can model user interactions with custom actions and objects for richer connections with your users.

Types

Built-in Objects

Facebook has defined a set of objects that can be used without any further customization on your part.

• Article
• Blog
• Book
• Profile (External)
• Movie
• TV Episode
• TV Show
• Video
• Website

Custom Objects

You have the ability to create your own objects and define all properties of those objects.

Privacy Model

Objects are public entities that reside on the internet and must be available to Facebook's "scraper". All information defined in an object should be considered as public. You should anticipate that all information is easily accessible to anyone on the internet and therefore, no sensitive information or information that is exclusive for a user or set of users is stored.

Open Graph Aggregations

Aggregations

Aggregations are summary stories on Timeline that are defined by your application to showcase the Open Graph activities of a user in a structured and interesting way. You can customize your application's Aggregations and preview their look and feel with sample data in the App Dashboard.

Aggregation Models

• Gallery
• Item
• List
• Map
• Number
• Table

Privacy Model

Aggregations are displayed on your Timeline, so those users who are allowed access to your Timeline will be able to see your aggregations. Each aggregation contains information based actions you've taken from the associated app. Because a user can decide to hide certain stories or change the privacy for a single story, the information in an aggregation may be different from viewer to viewer.

Examples

You may have seen Open Graph aggregations on your Timeline. Here is an example of an Open Graph aggregation for questions you may have followed using Quora:

Source:Facebook.