I'm trying to write a program that can retrieve the comments (as they happen) in my Facebook Live videos. Looking through the Docs I see the following text:
Reading Comments and Reactions
You can read live video comments by polling the Video Comment edge. In order to do this in the most efficient way so as not to exceed Graph API rate limits, we recommend receiving API updates via webhooks. You can also read live video reactions by polling the Reactions edge.
When I look at webhooks I can't seem to find any documentation that states how often they are called. Are they called on every comment, or at some pre-defined interval?
Also, webhooks callbacks run the risk of being received out of order. What's the best way to ensure that no messages are missed?
Thanks.
As of 3/7/2017 it is possible to be alerted about a comment posting via webhook but the comment itself are not sent in the request.
Apparently they updated their documentation. They dont suggest to use webhooks anymore for live comments. Now they suggest to use Polling. https://developers.facebook.com/docs/videos/live-video/production-broadcasts#comments
Related
I was previously using the Messenger Broadcast API to send regular updates to ALL users on my Facebook chat bot. These updates include daily news, feature updates etc. However now that the API is deprecated, I can't find any alternative API to do the same thing.
One possible alternative to this is to iterate through all the user's of my app and manually send them messages using the SEND API. However this is quite inefficient and you can easily hit maximum rate limits as mentioned in the documentation. So I would have to send out this manual update over a long period of time slowly to avoid hitting the rate limits. This feels like a hacky fix when the Broadcast API provided such a simple solution.
I can't seem to find any obvious alternative to the Broadcast API in Facebook's documentation. Is there any alternative API/technique I can use for my use-case?
I would need to write a script in order to automate this task:
Monitor new likes on a Facebook Page periodically.
When a new like is detected, identify the person who gave it
Send them a private message, thanking them and pointing them to additional resources that may be of their interest.
Would this be feasible using the Facebook API? The documentation strikes me as a little unwelcoming for the casual observer, and I'm not sure whether this is impossible or it's just that I haven't dived deep enough. Are the three steps above doable using the API?
You can use a cron job to get the number of likes of a Page with the /page-id endpoint.
You can´t get the fans of a Page with the API, and you can´t get the "last liker" either.
Auto-sending and message prefilling is not allowed (it would be spam anyway), and you can only reply to use messages as a Page. You can´t initiate a conversation.
Does anyone know a way to fetch a user/page inbox messages in real time?
I've found this link, but there is no mention about inbox messages.
The Real-time updates are about... -updates-. That means you will only get notified about changes in the fields described in that link (not regarding the Payments API, that's a different case).
So, you can't get real-time inbox messages.
You can subscribe to the notifications, but I'm not really sure if Messages notifications are included in those...
Jeff Lindsay, who coined the term 'webhook', said that the difference between webhook and http callback is that webhooks are user-defined. I think I understand what he meant, but I was thinking about it and I asked myself, can webhooks be effectively used by regular users (I mean: non-developers)?
Usually people don't have a clue how the internet works, they don't know what http is, terms like URL, callback, or request-response don't say anything to them. I've heard that many people do not know the difference between a web browser and a web site, they think that internet really starts at google.com and they type in all urls in the google search box... I mean, what's the use of webhooks when you're not a developer?
Do you think services like AlertGrid make sense? It's a webhook consumer that you can configure to dispatch alerts (SMS, phone, email) either when the callback is NOT received in x amount of time, or when the received data meets user-defined condition, plus it does some data visualization. We wanted it to make webhooks usable for non-developers. But still it requires an initial integration by someone who at least knows how to configure the source to send the webhook events. In many cases it only takes pasting an url to a textbox, but it seems to be beyond the skills of a typical user.
So, are the webhook doomed to be used by software developers only, or is there a chance that millions of Facebook or Twitter users will start making use of them somehow?
I think that something implemented using Webhooks can be made very user friendly.
Suppose Stack Exchange allowed users to define a webhook that would be notified whenever you earned a badge. You could supply a custom URL, or there could be simple buttons to click that would set it up for your Facebook or Twitter account. It could be as simple as the Facebook Like button.
YES I think this is a great idea. It's actually something I designed in my head a couple months ago and didn't think the product existed.
Webhooks are extremely powerful and having a 'service bus' aggregate/manage/dispatch these callbacks is extremely compelling to me.
I think that we are a long way from the general public consuming webhooks in any sort of meaningful way but I don't see why not. I remember when RSS was a 'developer' only technology.
Thanks for the link. I'll be digging in more this weekend.
I have created Twitter bots for many geographic locations. I want to allow users to #-reply to the Twitter bot with commands and then have the bot respond with the results. I would like to have the bot reply to the user as quickly as possible (realtime).
Apparently, Twitter used to have an XMPP/Jabber interface that would provide this type of realtime feed of replies but it was shut down.
As I see it my options are to use one of the following:
REST API
This would involve polling every X minutes for each bot. The problem with this is that it is not realtime and each Twitter account would have to be polled.
Search API
The search API does allow specifying a "-to" parameter in the search and replies to all bots could be aggregated in a search such as "-to bot1 OR -to bot2...". Though if you have hundreds of bots then the search string would get very long and probably exceed the maximum length of a GET request.
Streaming API
The streaming API looks very promising as it provides realtime results. The API allows you to specify a follow and track parameters. follow is not useful as the bot does not know who will be sending it commands. track allows you to specify keywords to track. This could possibly work by creating a daemon process that connects to the Streaming API and tracks all references to the bot's names. Once again since there are lots of bots to track the length and complexity of the query may be an issue. Another idea would be to track a special hashtag such as #botcommand and then a user could send a command using this syntax #bot1 weather #botcommand. Then by using the Streaming API to track all references to #botcommand would give you a realtime stream of all the commands. Further parsing could then be done to determine which bot to send the command to. This blog post has more details on the Streaming API
Third-party service
Are there any third-party companies that have access to the Twitter firehouse and offer realtime data?
I haven't investigated these, but here are a few that I have found:
Gnip
Tweet.IM
excla.im
TwitterSpy - seems to use polling, not realtime
tweethook
I'm leaning towards using the Streaming API. Is there a better way to get near realtime #-replies for many (hundreds) of Twitter accounts?
UPDATE: Twitter just announced that in the future they will have User Streams which expands upon the Streaming API. User Streams Preview
Either track or follow will work for the cases you describe. See http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Streaming-API-Documentation#track for details on what track actually does. The doc on follow is on the same page.
There are rate limits of sorts on the streaming API, but they have to do with how big a slice of the total tweet stream you're consuming. For writing a bot like this you won't hit these limits without a pretty big user base. And when you get that user base you can apply for elevated access levels that increase the rate limets.
There's the twitter firehose but you're probably best off using the Streaming API. The firehose is open to Google (try googling your twitter name) and as the link says they're opening it up to all soon enough.
You'll want to get your IP whitelist too.
If your not already, you want to check out the GoogleGroup for twitter devs.
The track predicate for the streaming api would actually be useful because if you follow your bot's user IDs, you'll get all the messages made by your bots and all the other messages that mention your bots #usernames (including #replies). It really does track everything public on twitter relating to the user IDs you follow with it, give it a shot.
REST API:
The most comprehensive results with the least amount of false positives. Will include protected statuses if the bot is following the protected account. If you poll every thirty seconds it is pretty close to realtime and you will be well under your rate limit (350/hour) if you are using api.twitter.com/1 with OAuth.
Streaming API:
You will want to avoid the Search API. It is trending more and more towards popular results and not complete results.
Streaming API
The fastest but also likely to miss some statuses as well as include false positives. Protected statuses for example are not included. Track for a screen_name will return statuses with that screen_name in it but will also include tweets that just have the screen_name as a string without the # so be sure to filter on your side.