Last month Facebook announced a new standardized way to mark up web pages concerning things like books, movies, music and more. It was called the Open Graph Protocol and was ostensibly intended to make the web comprehensible to computers building a profile of your interests across many different websites.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t implemented very well, according to GetGlue CEO Alex Iskold. Iskold, a long-time contributor to this site, penned the most extensive guide to understanding Facebook’s Open Graph and a critique of how it was constructed, implemented by launch partners and by Facebook itself. Yelp, IMDB and Pandora for example were all launch partners but have implemented the system incompletely or not at all, even several weeks after launch. Now Iskold has taken his own company’s competing semantic markup of pages around the web and used it to build a replacement for a large part of the Facebook code in the wild – using Facebook’s own format. Developers interested in understanding the content across 300 major websites, in Facebook’s own terms, can now find a robust source of data at GetGlue.
Iskold says of the struggles to roll out Facebook’s protocol:
“We saw that a lot of initial partners didn’t implement Facebook Open Graph protocol correctly. GetGlue already has over 15 million entities and all these pages indexed. So we decided to add the adapter and use our experience with semantics to help people get the markup done right. What we’ve done is not really a replacement, it is more like an implementation of Facebook Open Graph based on GetGlue index and database.”
GetGlue is a 3 year old New York City startup backed by Union Square Ventures and RRE Ventures. Its core product provides recommendations of music, books, movies and more based on semantic analysis of the sites a user visits around the web.
