Platform Updates: New Open Graph Tags for Media Publishers and More

This week, we are launching two Open Graph tags to help people follow their favorite media publishers and journalists. We are also adding several new requirements to make it easier for us to review your app and Open Graph submissions. Finally, we’ve included a few updates to using the Facebook Android SDK with ProGuard and the Graph API for events page posts.

New Open Graph tags for media publishers

As mentioned in our documentation, media publishers should include Open Graph tags in their article’s HTML to generate better previews of their content when shared on Facebook. Today we’re introducing updates to two tags:

• article:publisher lets a publisher link an article to their own Facebook page. When the article is shared in News Feed, a “like” button is displayed so people can like the publisher page.

• article:author lets a publisher link an article to the Facebook profile of the author. When the article is shared in News Feed, a “follow” button is displayed so people can follow the author. The author needs to have Follow activated on his or her profile for this button to appear.

The “Follow” and “Like” buttons will only appear for people who haven’t already followed the author or liked the publisher page.

New requirements for app and Open Graph submissions

We are introducing several new requirements to make it easier for us to review your app and Open Graph submissions:

• Apps that use icons which do not fill the entire space should use a transparent background
• App category is now a required field to make it easier for us to surface apps in App Center and Search
• During the Open Graph submission process, we now require that you include at least 2 screenshots of the in app user flow and one screenshot of what your action will look like when published to timeline.

Using the Facebook SDK and ProGuard in your Android app

If you use ProGuard with your Android app, please add this snippet to your app’s proguard-project.txt configuration file:

-keep class com.facebook.** *;
-keepattributes Signature

These flags are used to preserve generic signatures and type information used for reflection. Both flags are necessary for the Facebook SDK to function correctly in an Android app that uses ProGuard.

Ability to suppress News Feed stories when creating events for Pages

You now have the ability to suppress the creation of a News Feed story when you create a new event for a Facebook page. See our Graph API page posts documentation for more information.