It involved a nebulously titled product called Open Graph, the first version of which had launched at Facebook’s developer conference F8 the year before I joined.* A later version added the verbal dictionary that accompanied “Like,” expanding the Facebook vocabulary to things like “play,” “listen,” “watch,” or “buy.” It was the new subject-verb-object language of everything you did online. “Antonio García Martínez listened to Wax Tailor’s ‘Only Once’ on Spotify.” Rather than merely express some vague approval via Like, Facebook users could now broadcast everything they were doing, with the aid
It involved a nebulously titled product called Open Graph, the first version of which had launched at Facebook’s developer conference F8 the year before I joined.* A later version added the verbal dictionary that accompanied “Like,” expanding the Facebook vocabulary to things like “play,” “listen,” “watch,” or “buy.” It was the new subject-verb-object language of everything you did online. “Antonio García Martínez listened to Wax Tailor’s ‘Only Once’ on Spotify.” Rather than merely express some vague approval via Like, Facebook users could now broadcast everything they were doing, with the aid of outside developers who built Facebook’s new grammar into their products. By doing so, these developers made their products “social,” and potentially viral. In exchange for pumping their data full-throttle into Facebook, those outside developers—music players like Spotify, or publishers like the Washington Post—got News Feed distribution, driving yet more users to their content and services. That was the dream, anyhow. The monetization side of this was almost certainly not what you’re thinking. Mining or selling the data wasn’t the point. By oblique analogy to Google’s AdWords, in which promoted results appear alongside regular search results, the distribution of certain Open Graph stories would be “boosted” and appear more often in a user’s feed. Zynga and Eminem would in theory pay to have their stories boosted, and have you, the user, engage with their product or content more of...
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“Sponsored Stories” (Open Graph) - Another monetization product that failes
