Technology

OpenGraph’s Potential for Socializing Health and Wellness

Facebook’s Timeline is coming.  If you haven’t seen it, the Timeline is essentially a chronological view of everything you’ve ever shared with Facebook – all the way back to when you were born (something that will need to be artificial for those of us at a more advanced age).  The user experience and the very idea of being able to get a view of the events of your life in a social context is one that has privacy focused individuals cringing.  Conceptually however, it is a game changer that leverages information from around the web – the ubiquitous OpenGraph standard – to fill in the little holes in your life and for all intents and purposes record anything and everything you care to share with Facebook for posterity

OpenGraph is a data model, and through your interactions with web sites enabled for OpenGraph – a meta model is built around your interactions with those sites.  So for example, IMDB (the Internet Movie Database) is OpenGraph enabled, providing other OpenGraph enabled sites (like Facebook) to leverage your interaction with it to learn about a semantic relationship between you and a movie or TV show.  In it’s simplest form, it’s simply IMDB putting a “Like” button on every movie profile page that when clicked, sends that information to Facebook which in turn, realizes you clicked the “Like” button and adds that action to your Facebook profile.  Facebook may also see that the object that you’ve liked is a movie, and add it to your favorite movies.  It may also look at a list of the actors in that movie and add that, too, quietly to your profile.  All of this allows Facebook to learn more about you and improve your Facebook experience.  For IMDB, it allows them to gain traffic from the largest social networking site in the world.

But OpenGraph is indeed largely only going to communicate information you WANT to share with Facebook.  The expense of someone integrating their site in such a way that allows the user to drive that interaction is almost 0.  For a price (coding effort for the site developer) they can too PUSH that data to Facebook based on an interaction and nominally with little action from the Facebook user (they would only be asked once if it was okay for that site to access your data, as Facebook connect works today).  And it’s not limited to Facebook – it just so happens that Facebook is at the moment the greatest consumer and producer of information about individuals that the world has ever seen.

But why would OpenGraph ever be limited to creating this semantic model of the web and the metamodel of how we interact with it to movie databases and newspaper sites?  In theory, there is nothing preventing a user’s interactions with AllRecipes.com for instance being modeled against a weight management tool, so that as a dieter, I can tell Weight Watchers for instance that “I ate this” – akin to Facebook’s “Like” button.  As I accrued these interactions, the OpenGraph consumer of this information – the Facebook analogue – could hum in the background understanding things like when I had cravings, or when I was most likely to skip a meal, or when I was going entirely off track.  Just like with Facebook, the value realized by sharing this information is only as much as a participant in the metamodel is willing to share.  But Facebook has proven time and again that if you provide enough value to someone looking to share something about themselves, they are willing to give up a modicum of privacy to get it.

Today, the user experience for tracking health information is simply arduous, and thus no one has succeeded in creating this portable record of my health and wellness.  Google Health is gone, HealthVault is living in obscurity.  Can OpenGraph – or a close cousin, provide the integral and simple experience that leverages the daily interactions people have with the world around them to maintain a timeline of health and wellness events?  If it can, then there is the opportunity for someone to build a destination that leverages that stream of information like Facebook does to improve outcomes, automate coaching, and engage people where barriers currently prevent adoption today.

Ryan Norris is the Director of Technology at Medullan. He has a background working with physicians and clients in the eHealth space in developing and delivering solutions that better interconnect providers and create more informed patients through extensible service architectures and highly-usable interfaces.