One of the most exciting opportunities for startups in recent months is the new Facebook Open Graph. The life blood of every startup is the ability to reach new users. The old “viral black magic”. Facebook and Twitter were always some of the best tools. Startups who managed to get their users to share more content on these networks, received in return a stream of new users to their services. But the new Open Graph capabilities takes this to a all new level.

First and most important is the fact that users don’t need to do any action to share something. It is all done automatically in the background. You listen to a song – it goes to your timeline. You watch a video – it goes to your timeline. I’ll be the first one to admit that at first, as a user, this option is a bit scary. I wouldn’t want to use this option with every service. But Facebook thought also about that and are giving you, as a user, some nice benefits to enable this functionality. If you use it with a music service like Spotify for example, it allows you to easily see all the music you listened to. Forgot what was this cool song you discovered last week? No worries. With one click you can find it. It’s also quite cool to see how your music taste change over time.

But for developers this functionality is pure gold. It means that users will constantly keep pushing your content in front of their friends. The specific app aggregation view is also great. It allows other people to easily discover vat amount of content through their friends’ profile pages. Just check the how my Stagedom timeline looks like. With one glimpse you can see exactly what music I listen to, which new artists I discover and find new music videos from the web.
And the best thing: The integration with the Open Graph API is very simple. It took me just a few hours to configure everything. There is simply no excuse to not integrate with it right away.