Open Graph Usage

Question

I guess this is more of an "ask for information" post rather than "fix this for me" post. I've done some research but im a little confused as to what the facebook open graph is.

To give a little bit of background, basically i wanted to post user actions to users facebook walls (assuming they were logged in via facebook). I originally was going to do this in the same way as Twitter. That is to say, i was simply going to request the write permission and post something to users own wall under using their account access token.

However i came across this graph API, which seems to be a far better way of doing this, and it allows it look a bit more fancier than just some wall post. So i finally read and understood enough to set up my open graph action and object. Fought with the meta tags as i didnt understand how they worked, and finally got the debug tool for the graph to return a nice set of info about the "object" that the action was taken on.

So i went to run a code test and nothing appeared on my wall or anywhere i can see. After some var_dump()'ing, i see that theres a whole lot of info coming back from the api call. It does seem like its returning multiple sets of the same info with different id's, but i assum its working as im getting info back about my "object" and dont see anything that looks like an error.

So after that i read some more, and i think i found that open graph is useless unless the user has this timeline thing activated which was supposed to go live to public a couple of weeks back.

So a few questions if anyone could answer them:

1. Are these graph api calls useless unless people use this timeline thing. If yes, are there any other ways other than direct post to wall's to do what i want to do. Also, if yes, is there a way of checking if the user has timeline active (as a way of providing fallback if it isnt)

2. Will at some point this timeline be applied to everyone and take over something.

P.S: If you haven;t gathered, i'm not a big facebook user, so please excuse the use of words like "thing" and other stuff i say that seems strange :)

Thanks to anyone that can provide some info on this

Answer 1

At the moment, Open Graph is in beta, yes this means your actions will only be visible to your own app developers. For these developers, timeline will have now been automatically enabled.

Soon after timeline launches - it will be gradually rolled out to all 800 million facebook users - open graph will come out of beta and will be available to all users.

So keep building now and you'll be ready for the launch of timeline and open graph.