Just the other day I got approval from Facebook that the “read” action, available for Facebook’s Open Graph “Frictionless Sharing” was approved for StayNAlive.com. What this means is that if you click the link on the right of this blog, under “Click below to post to your Facebook Timeline when you read articles on Stay N Alive”, every post you read on this site will be automatically shared to your Facebook Timeline under the “News” section of your timeline. This means your friends will see what you read here, just like anything I were to share to Facebook. (Some day I need to design it so it’s more enticing to authorize this – hopefully soon)
You may have seen this done before with other blogs and news sites, such as the Washington Post Social Reader. When your friends see articles you read, they are more likely to click through and read them because they’re associated with someone they’re familiar with. Then, they can read and participate in the experience with you.
I just wrote about how traditional blogging is dead, and instead needs to evolve to more social models of content flow. This is one way I am trying to make that happen. Like I said, this blog isn’t dead. It’s just that it will become more and more a part of the social networks you most actively participate.
If you feel so obliged, please click through to this article and click that link over on the right. It’s one of the best ways you can spread the word about what I write, and the things I stand for. Or, just click below – I’m embedding the form right below via a Facebook Social Plugin (click through to the article to see it on the blog).
In a future article I’ll share how I did this, on a Blogger.com blog, nonetheless!
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Nice. How long did it take you to make these changes to your blog? On a geeky scale – is the process a 1 or a 10 (extremely geeky).
I'll let you decide the Geeky scale, but it took me only 30 minutes to implement (and just a bit of time to figure out a few quirks). As far as difficulty, it is probably about a 5. For me it was pretty easy, but for someone with little programming knowledge it may be a little difficult to understand.
I wonder how to make Open Graph for entire domain but not only for single URL.
Cool, I like that!
How long did it took Facebook to approve your actions to be public?
From the time they went public: about 15 days. I applied during the beta when it wasn't public though.
Hi Jesse,
I was also looking to integrate the Open Graph on Blogger. It doesn't look particularly complicated, even for someone with limited experience.
I was wondering however if it's possible to use the Open graph to publish events on my own Facebook Timeline, not only on the Timeline of visitors, for each new post I publish. Something like “George wrote/published this and that…”. I know this can be done with third party Facebook apps, but…
I saw that Open Graph also supports publishing old events/posts to the timeline with the original time & date of the posting, that would mean I can replicate the history of my blog on the Timeline and would be very cool IMO! Do you think this is possible with the current implementation?
You may need a 3rd party script, and you could have it subscribe to the RSS feed for your blog. As soon as it detects a new feed you should be able to post a new action to the Timeline.