At the last f8 developer conference in San Francisco last year, Facebook first spoke about it’s Open Graph. There was the promise of a whole bunch of apps that would have many types of actions feeding into the ticker and news feed.
According to Facebook developers who developed Open Graph:
“Open Graph helps people tell stories about their lives with the apps they use. It provides developers with the opportunity to deeply integrate their app into the core Facebook experience, which enables distribution and growth.”
Watching? Running? Cooking? Friends discover and rediscover apps through the stories friends share in news feed and the content they highlight on their timeline. Open Graph allows people who use the app to share their stories about what they are doing in it or with it.
Facebook defines it’s Open Graph actions as “the high-level interactions users can perform” in a Facebook-connected app. These actions include the following:- liking, reading book, buffering a video, listening to new music, pinning an image on Pinterest, etc.
Thus, the 400 billion actions stat is strikingly impressive, but given the company’s 1+ billion user base, this was quiet predictable.
Facebook developers are quick to add that “on average, people choose to share their app activity”. This voluntary sharing stat appears to include automatic, opted-in sharing from third-party apps. Facebook has also shared that as of March 2013, “110 million songs, albums and radio stations have been played 40 billion times” via Facebook-integrated apps and 1.47 million books have been shared.
These statistics may be enthralling to developers working directly with Facebook’s platform than an average user, but they do shed a light on Facebook’s wide reach amongst the masses.