Is Facebook Open Graph going to enable “proper” social TV

Facebook have given us a rich vocabulary to describe media consumption, have we just social TV better than the humble hash-tag?

A few months ago I blogged about hashtags, and how they were imperfect but mostly worked… One of my meaningless predictions was that “Services like Facebook, Twitter and Google+ will provide ways to embed this metadata in posts”.

Today Facebook unveiled Open Graph at f8. I didn’t really pay that much attention until someone linked to a way to get the new profile quicker, which involved signup up to develop an app using the Open Graph actions.

At which point I realised I was staring at a simplified RDF: you have Objects, and Verbs.

Defining Verbs and ObjectsClicking through to define the objects you can define custom fields: both visible and hidden. The channel people are watching a show on, the episode number, the internal identifier to link back to it on the website. Give Facebook the data to bubble up insights like “5 of your friends are watching the XFactor”, but driven from data and not term-extraction from statuses.

Facebook always had the social network. Now it’s defined ways to create these events that have never been worthy of statuses, but have always been ready for Facebook’s insight.

It will be very interesting to see what the likes of GetGlue, iPlayer, Zeebox make of this. We’ve just been given a sensible way to aggregate realtime viewing activity.

Who’s going to be the first to populate it easily?