Facebook Open Graph: A new take on semantic web. A few weeks ago, Facebook announced an Open Graph initiative – a move considered to be a turning point not just for the social networking giant, but for the web at large.
The company’s new vision is no longer to just connect people. Facebook now wants to connect people around and across the web through concepts they are interested in. Support for advanced RDFa markup in OGP - Open Graph Protocol. The Open Graph protocol and Drupal. A couple of days after Dries Buytaert gave his keynote at DrupalCon San Francisco and reaffirmed his support for the Semantic Web in Drupal, Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg announced at the f8 developer conference the brand new Open Graph protocol, a technology to turn webpages into social objects and capture them in a social graph. The announcement was backed up by a lot of PR and according to Facebook, 50,000 websites have already implemented OGP including IMDb, NHL, Posterous, Pandora, Rotten Tomatoes, Yelp and more.
There is plenty to read about the marketing around this announcement, but I'm going to keep this post at a technical level only. The good news is that the Open Graph protocol is built atop existing Semantic Web standards like RDF and RDFa, the same standards which have been integrated into Drupal 7.