Facebook gets strict with new Open Graph rules and tries to tone down all the over-sharing

Facebook has updated its Open Graph features and actions to decrease the volume of content shared automatically.

 Facebook has been doing its part to build its ecosystem thanks to the efforts of third-party developers and its Open Graph. While it’s certainly evolving the way we use and interact with the social network, there have been some noticeable missteps along the way — namely the fact that seamless sharing has turned News Feeds into a flood of your friends’ terrible taste in music and political articles you have no interest in. 

In order to curb some of the Open Graphs over-share problem, Facebook is implementing a few new rules for developers who want to display content. 

Facebook is increasing the size of its image and location-led stories and adding relevant imagery for developers using the Open Graph. So you may begin to notice that stories published to your Facebook News Feed are larger and more prominently featured, but Facebook claims that based on tests, these changes have boosted engagement rates. “Image-led stories have shown 70 percent more clicks for apps that produce high-quality, relevant imagery with low spam rates,” Facebook says. This will affect two types of Open Graph stories: Location-led and image-led content.

Location-led stories will include a visual map, courtesy of Bing, of your location. Non-Open Graph stories will simply display the city and state or country of your location.

Developers can now choose to publish 200 x 200 images for image-led stories in lieu of the 50 x 50 images they were previously limited to.

Users will also begin to see fewer automatically published stories (which is sort of a nice word for News Feed spam and smut) that can results from authenticating third-party Facebook apps. “When apps automatically publish stories on a person’s behalf in a way that is unexpected, such as when they browse an online store, it can surprise and confuse people,” Facebook Product Engineer Henry Zhang wrote in Facebook’s blog post.

Realizing this, Facebook is retiring “unexpected” automatic publishing and replacing it with Facebook approved custom actions based on its “Built-in Action Types.” What this means is that while stories can still be published automatically, you’ll have to opt-into Facebook’s preset actions that include “Like,” “Follow,” “Listen,” “Read” and “Watch.” If a developer’s app prompts you to watch a video for example, and you play the video, you’ll have to have watched that content for at least 10 seconds before a “watched an episode of [TV-episode]” appears on your Timeline.

Another change that Facebook is making includes the removal of a feature that allowed developers to force users to request permission for showing content like an article. If you’ve ever tried to read a Washington Times article that was published to your newsfeed, you wouldn’t be taken straight to the article. Instead you were blocked by an “authentication referral” pop-up that then requested permission from you to republish the fact that you’ve read that article. Instead, users will have to log-into that publisher’s Facebook app.

Finally, you can no longer publish content to your friend’s wall using its API as Facebook found that this feature was, to be blunt, generally hated by users. However Facebook will continue to allow users to publish to friend’s walls using the“feed dialog,” where you can share content with a friend using a third-party app — the difference being that the app is commenting on your behalf. 

If the Open Graph is going to transform the network and engage users the way Facebook wants it to, the platform has to ride a line between keeping brands and developers happy without spamming and annoying users. Among its efforts to do this include the new Promoted Posts feature, which gives users — all users, not just marketers — a way to surface their content (though it is first and foremost a new revenue source).

Still, quality is the focus over at Facebook right now, which is reflecting in an update to its Platform Policy (section III.A.6.) for developers, which states:

“Quality of content: you are responsible for providing users with a quality experience and must not confuse, defraud, mislead, spam or surprise users. For example, you must monitor your app’s negative feedback in Application Insights to ensure it stays below our thresholds, avoid excessive advertisements or bugs, and ensure the description of your app is consistent with your app’s content.”

The result should be a better controlled News Feed with less third-party posted content. 

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Google really wants you to play ‘Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon’

Looking for an entertaining way to feature the Google Knowledge Graph, the search company added support for the popular Kevin Bacon game.

First noticed by The Next Web earlier today, Google has added a new, custom search element for people addicted to playing ’Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon’. For anyone unfamiliar with the game, the player is given the name of an actor or actress and they attempt to link said actor or actress to Kevin Bacon within six steps. The player is allowed to link to other actors from television shows and feature length movies. For instance, Jimmy Stewart appeared in Airport ’77 with Kathleen Quinlan and Kathleen Quinlan appeared in Apollo 13 with Kevin Bacon. In addition, other players can attempt to link the actor or actress to Bacon in a fewer number of steps in order to win the round. 

In order to see this on Google, simply type “bacon number Jimmy Stewart” into the search field. The results will appear at the top of the search engine results page, likely in the shortest number of steps. While someone could simply cheat at the game by conducting secret Google searches on a smartphone, the tool will be handy for movie and television buffs that want to verify their choice for the shortest path to finding a Kevin Bacon connection. 

Pointed out by New York Magazine, the Google results are light on including politicians in the game beyond a handful of U.S. presidents. When asked about the absence of politicians included within the results, Google senior communications associate Roya Soleimani claimed that the Bacon number is based on Google’s Knowledge Graph rather than results from popular movie site IMDB. 

Soleimani stated “Google’s Knowledge Graph is our ‘map’ of real-world people, entities, and the connections between them. For most celebrities and some public figures, the feature will return their Bacon Number based on the connections in the Knowledge Graph. Our team is constantly working to make search smarter, and features like the Bacon Number equip our users with ways to explore and discover more.”

The concept for ’Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon’ was created approximately eighteen years ago by three students attending Albright College. The trio first came up with the game after watching a couple movies during a snowstorm that starred Kevin Bacon and the game developed into a fun party trick.

As the game become more popular, the trio had an appearance on Jon Stewart’s short-lived MTV show and they eventually landed a book deal. While Kevin Bacon originally disliked the concept of the game, he eventually warmed up to it and ended up writing a forward within the book for the three authors. Bacon also appeared in a Visa commercial poking fun of the concept in an attempt to prove his identity. 

Bacon has capitalized further on the popularity of the game by founding SixDegrees.org, a charitable organization that partners with Network for Good. Through SixDegrees.org, people can purchase gift cards that can be redeemed by charities or use the platform to create a fundraiser for a good cause. Since the inception of the organization, Bacon has helped raise nearly four million dollars in donations for charities and other worthy causes.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com