The Meta Tag Is Back With a Vengeance
Following announcements made at the Facebook F8 conference, TechCrunch reports that Google Developers are leaving Facebook due to substantial concerns over privacy.
The bone of contention seems to be over the fact that Facebook applications are no longer obliged to dump data collected on any user within 24 hours.
TechCrunch gauged real-time reactions posted on Buzz from Google Developers, in response to events at the F8 developer’s conference via Buzzzy. (Part owned by Incisive Media, Buzzzy is a search engine built to index Google Buzz and adds meta data to filter the social stream. Results can be filtered by company and job position, or in fact any piece of data made public via Google Profiles.)
It’s a nice example of how one can use meta-data to find more value in social search, something which Twitter are also seeking to do with their Q2 product, Annotations.
Does this mean that the meta tag back? It would seem so. Facebook’s Open Graph API requires website owners to add 7 new types of meta tag to your website.
From their documentation:
It looks like you will now need to include a favicon size image URL representing your social object, a “human name” for your site. This should be good news for brands that had to rebrand for search engines and a new page description designed to appeal to Facebook users.