Open Graph Exposes Specific Social Game Activities to Non-Gamers

Facebook's updates to Open Graph now expose social game activities from the app ticker to a Facebook-wide live ticker for an increase in viral discovery. As of today, all Facebook users -- whether they play social games or not -- will see a live app ticker on the right side of the Facebook home screen. This ticker is similar to the live app ticker that players can see on the Canvas page when accessing a social game. The Facebook ticker will display "a lightweight stream of everything that’s going on around you," according to CEO Mark Zuckerberg. This includes social game activities. An interesting feature of the games activity surfaced in the live ticker is that the games stories appear to be for specific in-game actions. This is possible, Zuckerberg says, because every piece of content in Open Graph has a picture associated with it. The example displayed at F8 shows a games story from Zynga's Words With Friends that names the friends playing the game and the specific word a friend played in that game. A non-player clicking on that story can view their friends' Words With Friends game board and for there, potentially convert to player by starting up a new game. Despite cutting back on virality of social games a year ago, this segment of Facebook is still the biggest feature of the Facebook platform. By dialing back up the virality with Open Graph and the recent Canvas updates, socials games are only going to get bigger. Follow updates from f8 on our liveblog.

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Open Graph Exposes Specific Social Game Activities to Non-Gamers

AJ Glasser

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AJ Glasser