When the new Facebook Open Graph was announced, we got pretty excited here at Max Rover. It’s a huge step into the right direction. Principally, it got us thinking about how we could use the new “Like” feature on our some of our projects, most notably on Between 10 and 5 – our Creative Showcase website. Max Rover is the publisher for 10and5, and we’re always looking at ways to grow our traffic. Since Social Media is our business, we generate quite a lot of referrals through Twitter and Facebook – the primary social dashboards for our market.

Then, with the announcement of the Like button, we thought the opportunities for increasing traffic would explode. We already see tonnes of traffic coming through our social Share buttons, so the thinking is that the Like buttons would do us even better.
This is not the case though.
When we had a look at the actual case studies, and how we could use the Like button, but unfortunately it’s not very publisher friendly. Taking a look at the Open Graph protocol published on the Facebook Developer wiki, as a publisher we won’t be able to Like articles as it is not included in the scope of objects. Typically, we would do an article on a photographer, but the intention behind the Liking for us would be to Like the Photographer. We still need to figure out how we are going to work with this.

It’s not an easy issue right now, but hopefully Facebook expands the metadata object types. Or else we’ll have to change some ways that we publish!