On Friday, Facebook made an important announcement on the Open Graph Protocol Google Group. In case you where too busy watching the World Cup, here it is:

“This week we’ve also added Open Graph protocol markup to every public Page on Facebook. This makes it easy for anyone to know that Starbucks is a company, the White House is part of the government, and Weird Al is my favorite musician.”

This was released on Facebook’s developers site on Paul Tarjan’s blog. The interesting news comes at the end after a fairly routine announcement about a new testing tool (important if you are publishing the Like button on your site, but not a big move).

This is big news. In the past, Facebook consumed RDFa. Now they are also publishing RDFa.

The Walled Garden Opens Up

The Like button is a great way for Facebook to suck recommendation data from around the web into their servers. If they succeed, this will give them many monetization opportunities. As we related in “Publishers Should Beware Of Geeks Bearing Gifts”, if you publish the Like button you get a lot of traffic (good news) but give up your recommendation data to Facebook (bad news).

That is still true. But Facebook has now offered another gift to publishers. You can now search Facebook and extract RDFa data. This is getting Facebook one step closer to being Linked Data. A few months ago anybody who predicted that would have got some odd looks.

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CONVERT BREAKS: __default__

On Friday, Facebook made an important announcement on the Open Graph Protocol Google Group. In case you where too busy watching the World Cup, here it is:

“This week we’ve also added Open Graph protocol markup to every public Page on Facebook. This makes it easy for anyone to know that Starbucks is a company, the White House is part of the government, and Weird Al is my favorite musician.”

This was released on Facebook’s developers site on Paul Tarjan’s blog. The interesting news comes at the end after a fairly routine announcement about a new testing tool (important if you are publishing the Like button on your site, but not a big move).

This is big news. In the past, Facebook consumed RDFa. Now they are also publishing RDFa.

The Walled Garden Opens Up

The Like button is a great way for Facebook to suck recommendation data from around the web into their servers. If they succeed, this will give them many monetization opportunities. As we related in “Publishers Should Beware Of Geeks Bearing Gifts”, if you publish the Like button you get a lot of traffic (good news) but give up your recommendation data to Facebook (bad news).

That is still true. But Facebook has now offered another gift to publishers. You can now search Facebook and extract RDFa data. This is getting Facebook one step closer to being Linked Data. A few months ago anybody who predicted that would have got some odd looks.

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