Facebook Adds Articles To Open Graph Protocol

Open Graph Like Icon Yesterday Facebook posted an update which resolved confusion from a number of developers who realized that there was no “article” object within the Open Graph protocol. Facebook also removed one statement from the Open Graph “best practices” area which stated that “users don’t want news articles and other transient content as objects on their profile”.

In an update posted last night, Facebook stated the following:

Beyond helping relate the Open Graph protocol to Semantic Web technologies and developing a variety of open source implementations, the community identified that a page type for an ‘article’ (such as a blog post or story on CNN) was missing. Multiple developers stood up saying that they would implement this new type if it were to exist, and it’s now part of the specification. (We’ll be shipping support for the new article type this week.)

What we still aren’t sure about is whether the creation of an “Open Graph object” also corresponds to the creation of a Facebook Page. We’ve reached out to Facebook and will be sure to update this post once we receive some clarification. For non-developers the distinction between all these things can be excessively complicated which is why services like the new Facebook like plugin for Wordpress are extremely useful.