Open Graph protocol: need more types
Open Graph is Facebook’s attempt to standardize a layer of descriptive metadata to all content on the internet. Being a fan of semantic movement Microformats, I’m trying to bring this to any sites that I develop these days.
Open Graph’s website says that currently, Facebook and Mixi (the Japanese social networking service) are the ones consuming this metadata. It’ll be interesting to see if Google will acknowlege this format in the future (if they’re not already). At the very least, adding Open Graph metadata to your HTML will improve the appearance of your content on Facebook when people ‘like’ your page or post it as a link on their wall.
One of the basic four datum that you add to your page is type. The problem is that there are so few types, even at a general level, I can’t see how they expect to classify all content on the web into these types.
There are a total of 34 types for all content on the web. In the business types, there are only the following five types:
- bar
- company
- cafe
- hotel
- restaurant
- article
- blog
- website
Categorised as: HTML, Web development
I agree the OpenGraph types are totally insufficient. I have found the Open Graph Music xxtension here, which was for me a great relief, but still a lot of obvious entity types don’t fit in any existing type defined by the protocol and still need to be covered.
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/music/
Some people (and organizations) simply invent their own type so to suit their needs… Maybe there is a standard way to define new extensions?
Thanks for the link, a friend of mine says: “You can define them yourself within your app although each has to be approved by FB still it’s certainly better than what they currently have.”