23 September 2011 0

Today, after working for the past few weeks with the Facebook engeineering team (special thanks to Gareth Morris and Julien Codorniou), we are very happy to announce the rolling out of new features on our web app Cinemur that take full advantage of Facebook’s new custom open graph.

So what’s the news?

Using the new custom open graph, you are now able to show your friends the actions you are currently doing on the app directly in their news feed or in their ticker*. For example, if you are watching a trailer, your friend will see a message like «Paul is watching Crazy, stupid, love’s trailer on Cinemur.».



More precisely the message will be a story like the following:



Using good meta tags on your web page, the story will show a clickable title, a description and an image/video, in a caption embed right into your friends’ news feed.

This leads to a brand new way of thinking about the interactions between Facebook and your app/website.

On Cinemur we have set a sample of custom actions and objects and you will be able to show your friends what you want them to see. As Facebook asks in their guidelines, a setting panel will allow you to enable/disable this feature.



Now you’ll also see some «Profile Units» summarising your different actions in boxes on your profile page. Like «The most played trailers”, or “the most liked movies». They’re a bit like aggregated Stories who help users express their identity by showcasing the actions they’ve done on your app.

Regarding the development, it’s not as easy as copy/pasting a like button on your site but the setting interface for developers is quite cool and easy to use.

First, you have to define some custom actions and objects using different words in past, present and futur etc. Then, using the SDK of your choice you can make API calls on the graph like: “/me/[app-namespace]/[action]?[object]=object_url”
Last, you’ll be able to define some profile units.
Et voila! Quite simple right?

Of course, you will need to make some tests, especially with the translation into different languages. Though Facebook does provide a translation engine to do this automatically.

For more information, you can find the official docs here https://developers.facebook.com/docs/customopengraph/

In backstage now, admins will have great new insights into the actions and objects used within their app. Here is a screen shot of the analytical tools that shows the funnel conversation from a story created in the news feed to clicks.



To sum it up, this may be the most important upgrade that Facebook has ever done to it’s platform. It will give birth to new kind of apps, with greater user experience.

We are looking forward in helping our clients to integrate their current or next apps with the Facebook platform and the custom open graph. For more information about us, please visit Leveraging the Facebook platform with MFG Labs.