I need to initiate searches on facebook marketplace from my application on the user's device. This needs to happen on the user's device, and as the facebook user associated with the user using the application, to avoid getting blocked by facebook. As far as I can understand, this cannot be achieved using facebook's OAuth login and accessing the facebook information that is accessible through it.
Another hypothetical way that comes to mind, is to use the token that the user uses to login into facebook itself, though this one sounds frankly illegal.
tl;dr is there a way to run a search and retrieve the results on facebook marketplace as a user on a user's device?
I found your question on SO, and spent a good bit of time researching this, as I wanted to know the answer myself. Unfortunately, as best as I can tell, this is not possible through any official APIs. It seems like they may have once had something like this, as I found several links to FB API documentation that looked promising. But, the links all rerouted back to the Graph API homepage. I found a couple of references to the big data breaches FB has suffered in the last couple of years as possible reasons why their APIs were retooled and locked down.
I found several Facebook developer posts with questions about a Marketplace API where there were either no answers after months or years, or an official Facebook moderator posting a response like "This is a great idea, we always want to improve, use this form to submit your idea" and so on with no follow up.
I also found at least one SO post within the last 18 months where someone in the comments claimed to be able to post products to FB, but I think this was related to the Business Page Product Catalog, and is not what you're looking for. This is more like if a car dealership or something wants to post a new car for sale that's tied to their FB business page.
The Graph API allows for some decent searching and edge traversal but it is all related to posts, pictures, feeds, etc., and nothing related to the marketplace. Facebook pushes their Marketing APIs so heavily that it was tough to filter through that noise. And, of course, all of marketing apis are geared toward creating ads.
I found some Facebook information around API URLs looking like https://graph.facebook.com/search=terms&type=some_type that was very promising. But the type options seem to be limited to adcountry, adeducationschool, adeducationmajor, adlocale, adworkemployer, adkeyword, adzipcode, adgeolocation, and audienceinterest. And, as I dug deeper, it appears this is related to finding targeting groups for creating targeted posts. Nothing for marketplace.
I think that the answer, unfortunately, is that there are no offical FB APIs at this time that will allow querying search results from the Facebook Marketplace, much less provide enough information to reproduce a listing to display on a 3rd party app.
Related
I want to create an iPhone app that displays (among other things) a specific Facebook wall. For a good user experience I didn't want an app that required the user to have a Facebook account and I didn't want to force the user to have to log in to Facebook to see the latest "news" in the app. I started out by getting the wall RSS feed and tried parsing it ... I can "see" all the data I need ... but that is getting complicated quickly and has too many variables that are making the final results less than stellar. I have read through the Facebook iOS programming tutorials and it seems to me like the SDK forces the user log in, which I don't like.
My question ... Is there a way to use the Facebook SDK with hard coded profile credentials to access a specific wall without forcing the user to login? If possible, is that a recommended approach? Any other ways to skin this cat?
I have read through the Facebook tutorial and searched through many postings on this site but haven't found an answer to this ... sorry if this a newbie question and has already been answered.
Item I.2. of the Facebook API policy list says
You must not include functionality that proxies, requests or collects
Facebook usernames or passwords.
It sounds to me like that's what you're proposing to do; i.e., the user will be able to see a certain wall, but using hard coded credentials (not their own). In other words, your credentials are proxying for the user.
I do not know if it is technically possible to do this (I imagine it is) but I don't think it's a good idea, and I do think it's a violation of the Facebook API terms of service.
First you need to get the a access_token by parsing your app id and secret.
https://graph.facebook.com/oauth/access_token?client_id=YOUR_APP_ID&client_secret=YOUR_APP_SECRET
Then send following request to get the data you want. Note that only public data will be accessible.
https://graph.facebook.com/FACEBOOK_USER_ID/?access_token=ACCESS_TOKEN
I have recently been looking into adding Facebook Insights into one of our client's websites (www.mcvuk.com). I've created an app to associate with this and added the necessary Facebook meta tags to my site which reference the app id.
I was, until today, having issues adding the app domain information to https://developers.facebook.com/apps but have added this information in today.
My question is how long does it take before you will start to see results filter through for the site and is there any way of checking that everything has been set up correctly?
It might not be a matter of time, it might be a matter of how many 'likes' the app or page has. At least for pages, it tells you "Once 30 people like your Page, you'll get access to insights about your activity."
That's an interesting point.
It all depends on which metrics (results) you're after and how much traffic your app gets.
Additionally, you might want to look at facebook documentation for the metrics (results) you're looking for -- some of them are available monthly or weekly, others are a lifetime aggregate, and some are daily.
The easiest way to test would be to ask some of your friends to do whatever it is you want to test (comment on a post, link to a page, etc.).
I hope that answers some of your questions.
When my Facebook app posts to the users stream those posts do not get links for Like and Comment. Other Facebook publishing apps, like Instagram, get these links.
I can't find it in my Facebook application's settings. Anyone knows how to do it?
(I think this is the same question as this one: Facebook : Like and Comment Functionality against Wall Post but I'm not sure.)
See Traroth's comment to get a more to the point description of what it is I'm asking about.
It seems Nathat Totten is right about how these links are defaults and that they are controlled by Facebook. There are three things that confuses this issue.
One is that Facebook Test Users behave a bit more special than you might think. Even when they are friends, they are not fully so. Making these default links turn up only for the user that posts them (for Test Users, mind you, I'm hoping it'll work all right for real users).
Another is the documentation for actions in the Facebook Graph API documentation for publishing Post objects:
A list of available actions on the post (including commenting, liking, and an optional app-specified action). read_stream. A list of JSON objects containing the 'name' and 'link'.
Which made me start to try find out how to include the commenting and liking links myself. I can't find this info anywhere, so maybe that changed without the above quoted documentation reflecting the change.
Anyway, if, indeed this is a Test User issue, then I don't need to do anything special to fix this. I'll try to remember to come back here when my (iPhone) app is ready for the real Facebook world and I get to see if it works in that environment or not.
With the Facebook API are only recent things (wall posts, friends status updates etc) obtainable or is everything ever associated with the user's account obtainable?
That's a tricky question.
First nowhere in the official documentation says how many items you can get from Graph API nor FQL.
Not only this. Also when trying to do normal recently querys you may find out that not every result is returnes. Nor from the Graph API, FQL, not even from the FQL Test Console.
All this is because serious bugs in the Facebook Platform.
On october 15 Facebook said in its blog
We have received a great deal of feedback recently about things we should do to improve Facebook Platform. The themes are clear: “fix the bugs,” “update the documentation,” “talk to us more,” and “make things more reliable.” We are listening, and this post outlines some of the things we are doing to address your concerns.
This means that they are now fixing the bugs that has been accumulated on many months in Facebook Bug Tracker.
One of the open Bugs in there says:
When using a FQL Query or utilizing the new Graph API to grab posts on a users
stream, not all posts are returned.
From what I can see, the system will grab the latest posts from within the last
month, and then becomes extremely spotty after that. I am able to grab posts
from myself up to 4/24/2010, at which point every single wall post I have
posted seems to disappear.
Many other developers have states the same thing under the comments of this Bug.
On 2010-09-27 Jeff Bowen (Developer from facebook) said the following
Hi all, we still need to add this to the documentation but the stream table is
limited the last 30 days or 50 posts, whichever is greater. Sorry this wasn't
previously published.
This have made many people upset since they assumed you could get everything from the Graph API.
Anyway this is for multiple results. If you want a single result apperently (from the commnets in thts bug) You could go as far as June 15 2009
Personally, I haven't tested yet again so I don't know if this actully works the way they say. Facebook Graph API is in constant change. It has been incomplete and buggy since the begining. But now Facebook says they are working on that.
I recommend every facebook developer to sign up for the Facebook Platform bug tracking system since there is a lot of not official things about facebook, that will impact your applications.
I'll keep an eye on there to see if more is said on this topic and update this answer if needed
I'm a graduate student whose research is complex network. I am working on a project that involves analyzing connections between Facebook users. Is it possible to write a crawler for Facebook based on friendship information?
I looked around but couldn't find any things useful so far. It seems Facebook isn't fond of such activity. Can I rely on the Facebook API?
Update (Jan-08-2010): Thank you very much for the responses. I guess I probably need to contact Facebook directly then. Cheers
Update (Feb-16-2011): A new book, "Mining the social web", just came out. In it, there is a chapter devoted entirely for mining Facebook using Python. Cheers.
You can't rely on the Facebook API unfortunately. To get friend information, you need to use something like friends.get(). However, any Facebook API method that returns user information like this requires that you have an active session key from that user, and generally the way you get an active session key is to have the user come to your Facebook application or page.
In summary, the information you are talking about is essentially private. You can't pick a person from Facebook, get their friends, and get those friend's friends, and so on. To me this is a good thing for privacy, but of course it prevents arbitrary analysis.
I'd throw out the idea of writing a quick and dirty application with some user appeal that you could use for research. If a group like S**t My Dad Says (funny, not really safe for work) can get 120,000 users in a couple of months, you could probably plead your case with a small research application and get a reasonable amount of users.
The problem is that facebook friendship information is typically private and only accessible to friends. It should be a lot easier to build this network on Twitter, if this is an option for you.
As others have stated, this is typically private information. If, however, Facebook per se isn't a requirement, you could use Google's Social API. A snippet from the Google Social Graph API page: "With the Social Graph API, developers can now utilize public connections their users have already created in other web services. It makes information about public connections between people easily available and useful."
Here's an article on using it in Ruby:
http://articles.sitepoint.com/article/google-social-graph-api-ruby-rails#
This lifecode post provide a basic python script to scrape your facebook friends contact info.
The output of this script, is the profile ID, profile pame, profile URL, e-mail address and mobile/phone number (if provided by friend).
WARNING: This is against Facebook TOS. Use at your own risk.
Info provided for educational and research purposes
http://ruel.me/blog/2010/11/26/scrape-your-facebook-friends-contact-info-with-python/
You can use http://www.facebook.com/directory/ to get the public listed people.