Nowadays Facebook has become one of the coolest ways to share information with people. So more and more developers tend to integrate Facebook sharing/like features on their Apps to reach more audience.

Typical Facebook posts look like "Someone shared a post" or "Someone likes a Post" but in OpenGraph you have the opportunity to design your Story from the ground level with appropriate grammar and stuff. ie. "Someone ACTION'S a OBJECT" This awesome possibility of Facebook has opened Facebook developers to use this so called "FB OpenGraph" to create various kinds of good looking sharing posts.

Example Facebook OpenGraph story look like this.



In this example: ate is the Action & dish is the Object.
Basically these are the two things which makes an OpenGraph custom Story.

  • Story = FB_OG_Action + some_joining_word + FB_OG_Object
  • Object is where those attributes including Post title, description, Picture and many other are bind with.
  • For the Action you can specify the attributes like Location etc.
Let me introduce you some of the biggest advantages of OpenGraph; well some use-cases!
  • Custom storie; ie. "Someone reads a book"
  • Sharing user Game scores/achievements to FB with OG "Someone scored 5000 on FlappySnake, woohoo!"
  • Normal Facebook feed share doesn't allow uploading images hence we had to mention a direct link to a image in the code. But using OpenGraph stories we now have the capability to upload the images to Facebook servers and use it from their. So the big overhead of storing images are been handled by this as well.
As FB developers site has more than enough information related to development and documentation stuff I am bit lazy to reinvent the wheel here :) Go read the docs to code! its pretty straightforward. Wish you all the best with FB Open graphing.

Side-notes:
  • Open Graph stories need to be approved by Facebook team before you can allow it to be used by general public users of Facebook. Until then only what you can do is Test with the FB account which you created the app  (you also can add more Test users via the Facebook's apps admin page.)
  • The review process might take 4-10 days.