Facebook Open Graph Object Types - Article? - facebook

Question

I am doing my best to understand what everything means in the Open Graph Protocol Reading the FB page on it and the OGP Page. What exactly does this mean in the world of FB and OGP:
Note that the Open Graph protocol is currently designed to support
real-life objects. If your URL is a piece of content — such as a news
article, photo, video, or similar — you should set og:type to article
(see below). Pages of type article do not have publishing rights, and
will not show up on user's profiles because they are not real world
objects
What exactly does Pages of type article do not have publishing rights, and will not show up on user's profiles I think I understand the publishing rights but what exacly does not show on the user;s profile? The user profile part is what I do not understand.

Answer 1

The purpose of posting responses to people's questions is the help them, not to be condescending. If you aren't going to try to be helpful, don't post.
<!-- This is what it means to set the og:type to article -->
<meta property="og:type" content="article" />
That is not "what it means" to set the og:type to article, it is merely an example of code showing the syntax for using the article type.
Clearly #Lynda is trying to understand the caveats of using article as the OG type, and for obvious reasons: the documentation does not offer a lot of best practice advice about which type to use, especially when you are adding a LIKE button to a single page of regular content (for example, an "About Us" page, or FAQs page) on a website.
The question is perfectly legitimate, if not expressed with the clarity of crystal.
If the "LIKE" (action) of a type = article web page object is not going to "show up on the user's profile", what good is the article type?
Sure, the answer is probably simple, something like "the article will show up on the user's timeline", but whatever the answer, it is not easily clear to those of us who are in the process of gaining an initial understanding of the Open Graph protocol.
#Lynda's question can really be reframed as follows: "What are the consequences of using the article type, and when should I really use it?"
Furthermore, the documentation also says:
Use article for any URL that represents transient content - such as a news article, blog post, photo, video, etc. Do not use website for this purpose. website and blog are designed to represent an entire site, an og:type tag with types website or blog should usually only appear on the root of a domain.
When trying to determine what type to use for a specific webpage that does not represent a real world object (like a movie), a page like an "About Us" page doesn't seem to qualify as "transient content", it does not represent the entire website, and it's not a blog or blog entry. So what type should be used?
I have searched high and low for a solid 24 hours and have yet to find any clarification on this beyond the two quoted pieces of developer documentation, yet it seems a simple question that content developers must face everyday now that we recognize the importance of feeding the Open Graph.
Should a web page with non-transient content that does not represent a real world object be tagged as "article", or not? The Facebook documentation essentially says no, but does not offer any obvious alternative.
And, to come back to #Lynda's question, where does a LIKED "article" web page appear on Facebook in relation to the user who did the liking? On their timeline? Anywhere else? This is also not made clear anywhere that I can find.
Sincerely,
Fritz

Answer 2

If for example you have a website for movies and on every movie page you include a <meta property="og:type" content="movie" /> and a Like Button then every time a user clicks con the Like Button he/she will include that movie in his/her Facebook Profile under Info/Movies.
So his/her friends will see that he liked that movie every time they review his/her profile (in addition to the message that gets posted to the wall saying "User X liked movie Y on site Z").
This is not the case with articles, only real world objects.
More information: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/ and http://ogp.me/
P.S. Don't forget to include the other required properties og:title, og:image and og:url.

Answer 3

The "type" is just an Open Graph <meta> tag you set in a page's <head>:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Example Page</title>
<meta property="og:title" content="Some example page" />
<!-- This is what it means to set the og:type to article -->
<meta property="og:type" content="article" />
<meta property="og:url"
content="http://example.com/canonical/url/to/this/content" />
<!-- etc -->
</head>
<body>
<!-- snip -->
</body>
</html>
Lots more reading: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/beta/opengraph/