Do you think it is possible to use Facebook API to easily discover popular (viral) Public posts, such as: https://www.facebook.com/knox188/posts/10159451336160245
Or maybe even narrowing down these posts to a specific country. So you could see what's popular for example in Germany.
I'm thinking it would require parsing Public posts data from user profiles and then determining their popularity by running Graph search. But... that's a lot of data.
What do you think? Or maybe you know some free or paid tools that do that? Something like Newswhip Spike - but for user posts, not Facebook Pages
Thanks in advance!
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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.
I am very new to the Facebook graph API trying to explore the API but I'm finding it very difficult to understand how to proceed and what things I need inorder to achieve my goals.
What my goal is that I need to create an application which can take the facebook posts, videos of different public posts stored which are stored in the database and find out the impression counts of those posts. Which I'll need to store later in database.
Many different user's public posts will be stored in the database. From those URLs I need to fetch their insights data, Impressions etc. I have created an app in the facebook developers. Gone through documentation and played a bit with the explorer tool.
But I'm still not sure what things I need to do in order to achieve this. How do I need to proceed. Can anyone help me here?
Thanks in advance
i'm working on project which mostly is a data-mining from social networks, so far, i've done twitter and it have really nice API, which allows me to pick an endpoint and recieve alredy filltered twits as streaming data. Now i'm working on a facebook, and there comes the question: with Graph API i would be able to get public feed of some definite page, but what if i would like to recieve posts from as many people as possible? Does Facebook Public Feed API works as Twitter's, and gives me data from as many sources as possible, or i missunderstood something?
Facebook has restricted public feed api usage and its now available only to handful no of teams: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/public_feed
Access to the Public Feed API is restricted to a limited set of media publishers and usage requires prior approval by Facebook. You cannot apply to use the API at this time.
You're look for the Facebook Search API. https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/search/
You'll need an app with a token to access these. Some might need higher permissions though, but the generic one will work to search commons actions types (post, places, etc) who're publicly available on the platform.
You won't be able to search for private publications. Unless you search user who gave you direct permissions to read their timeline (one by one).
I am curious as to how much data can be gathered using the fql or graph api from facebook. If the user has their info marked as public and I am not friends with them, i can see it on the site. However, i have just paid for a completed project someone did for me and the interface they designed does not get that data. For instance, their likes. I was told the api does not support all facebook data, but that seems wrong to me.
Here is the documentation for the graph api. Hopefully this will help you discover what data is available.
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.