Facebook Open Graph — After days of research. I can now proudly say it.

Yahoo! Social Bar

Few weeks ago, I was pretty curious about how Yahoo! (picture on left) and The Guardian does the Open Graph Social Bar thing. For those who don’t know yet, Open Graph is a Facebook implementation that lets you harness the power of social content. The Open Graph is a way for third party websites (everyone and everything on the Internet willing to have a Facebook Like button, Facebook comments, Facebook connect, or any Facebook powered-feature) to send data about actions on the website to Facebook.

Behind The Mic Social Bar Info

You may actually be implementing the Basic Open Graph Protocol on your blog already too, which are the “Share” and “Like” actions. But what I’m very curious about is the fact that the sites I mentioned has this application that lets your readers effortlessly share your content. Basically, by signing up with the app they made, you can start sharing to your friends automatically on what you READ. That’s a new action right there that I think is really catchy when your friends get to see it.

So i started studying about Facebook Open Graph implementation. You will need some SQL, PHP, and Javascript skills if you want this on your site. The format is:

[PROFILE NAME] [ACTION] [OBJECT] ON [APPLICATION NAME].

I think this sentence breakdown is pretty much similar to your easy English course.

So I started making my own app, Behind The Mic. App name would be nice look read at if that’s the name of your blog itself. Then, I realized that you can’t just create an Open Graph App. You have to submit to Facebook EVERY action your app will trigger, how will it trigger, and what happens on the trigger moment.

Pretty complicated huh? Yes… and that how I think there are only a few sites implementing this type of Open Graph application. That  is, Yahoo, The Guardian, Dailymotion, and more including… BEHIND THE MIC!

'Behind The Mic' Social Bar

Yup! My application action to READ AN ARTICLE has been approved after I passed all the requirements needed to the Built-In Action READ by Facebook Open Graph! It was denied at first because you need to put a Global switch, and a post remover for it to be approved. April 13, 2012, 2:47A.M. marks the official implementation of Behind The Mic on Open Graph! And I think I can proudly say that BEHIND THE MIC is the First Philippine Blog to have Open Graph Social Bar implemented! Yey!

Now you can share what you read seamlessly just by turning SOCIAL ON! And nothing to worry about, we will only write sensible articles of course.

Read more about social here. Enjoy!