It's been a long time since I checked out what the boys at Facebook were up to, and was hoping to run into some more Social Plugins. At first glance, I didn't find anything new - a little surprising, given how Facebook is known (and probably reviled by developers the world over) for the arbitrary, sweeping changes they have a habit of making to the platform and plugins from time to time.

Then I spied something called Open Graph Beta.

Seems like Facebook is going to allow us normal website folks to become part of the Open Graph, allowing us to define our own objects and actions. So, soon you won't have to only "Like" everything on the WWW... you could "be awestruck by" and "worship" the Roach and his creations. You could also technically "curse", but I'm saving that option only for myself.

Well, it will be some time before I can implement these changes. For one, Facebook themselves need to get their act together - you need to submit your new actions to them for review first, but they are too busy rolling out the new Timeline (not to be confused by this far more awesome Timeline) to do that. Twiddling my 4 thumbs till then...

They do have a few new Social Plugins that use Open Graph Beta, but I can't seem to get them to work yet. I'm also a little worried Facebook may make things tough for the Roach if they make SSL certificates mandatory. Already, applications that display within Facebook must be running over https or you get warnings / the app does not load. I had written a tiny app to display a welcome message to all visitors to The incredible Roach's Facebook page, complete with custom Roach logo, that urged them to Like the page to become a fan. Now I don't think that works for most of you who have switched over to Facebook on https for fear of hackers.

But let's stop the Facebook-cursing here and applaud them for their new Twitter-like live updates that appear on the top right of your news feed. I think this has contributed to a large extent to the sudden spurt in the Roach's fans, and their activity level on Facebook - people are more likely to notice updates I post now... and we now have 14 shiny new fans in just a week! Keep it going people!