I've been looking through the Facebook-graph API for a way to get a kind of 'delta' of friend changes since a given date. it looks like the /<id>/friends end point will give me a total count at the current time. What I'd like is that same value but for a historic date (i.e. where the date is this time last year, so that I can see how many friends someone has made/lost since then).
(I was originally hoping Facebook would just let me see when people became friends, but it looks like a user's friends list, and all the related details, are off limits).
Unfortunately I can't just rely on the use of future dates, though that may be the solution I end up with (as in, I request the count at the current date, and then at some point in the future request it again and compare the difference).
I can see from my own Facebook account that they do track when a friend/connection was made, and I'm not looking to dig up details on the friend/connection. Ideally I'm looking for something like /<id>/friends?asat=<date>
As a follow up question assuming this feature isn't available through the facebook-graph API, how would I go about requesting this feature for a future version?
There is no way to get the history, you can only call the API endpoint on a regular basis and store the difference with date on your own.
Feature requests can be sent here: https://www.facebook.com/help/contact/268228883256323
...although, i doubt that they will implement this, to be honest. Those kind of "insights" are usually only available for Pages, but not for User Profiles.
Related
Currently I am writing a wrapper around the Facebook Graph API to collect all the posts made on specific pages.
For some reason, I am only able to query 600 posts per year. When there is more than that on a page, the API does not complain but randomly leaves out posts. To me there is no rhyme or reason which posts are left out: Certain weeks are completely unaffected, while for others I only get a partial amount of posts or none at all.
Carefully reading the API yields this statement:
The API will return a maximum of 600 ranked, published posts per year.
So, it seems like this is intended behavior.
However, this question from 2015 suggests that this limit is a bug.
Furthermore, I am able to retrieve the full list of posts via the data export of the insights tab in Facebook itself. It seems bizarre to me that I am not able to do the same with the API.
Essentially I have three questions:
Is the year limit intended behavior?
If the limit is intended, what determines which 600 posts are returned per year?
If the limit is intended, is there a way to get around it to retrieve a full list of post(-ids)?
Yep, I've seen this myself, particularly with pages that publish in high frequency such as newspapers. When retrieving posts historically there can be single days missing, the odd week and sometimes a whole month. The only way to not miss any posts is to call the API daily but this only helps moving forward. Or you can contact me and I'll see if we have the posts you're looking for ;-)
We (a local hackerspace) have a Tumblr blog and wanted to make ourselves a Facebook page. Before going live we wanted to import all our Tumblr content to Facebook so our fans on Facebook can browse it here as well. For this I have made an app that reads all the posts from our Tumblr blog and publishes them to our new Facebook page (backdating those posts as well). Here's my problem: after the app does about ~130 re-posts (~260 operations: publish + backdate) I start getting an error:
Received Facebook error response of type OAuthException: It looks like you were misusing this feature by going too fast. You’ve been blocked from using it.
Learn more about blocks in the Help Center. (code 368, subcode 1390008)
The block is gone the next day, but after a similar amount of operations it's back. After a couple of hours later, when the block is gone again, I introduced 6 second delays between operations, but that didn't help and after 19 re-posts I'm blocked again. Some facts:
I am publishing posts to a feed of (yet) unpublished page I am the (only) owner of.
The app is a standalone JAVA application and uses restfb to work with Facebook.
The line that is causing the error: facebookClient.publish("me/feed", FacebookType.class, params.toArray(new Parameter[0]));
All publish operations contain a link, mostly to respective posts on out Tumblr. Some contain message, caption or a name (depending on post type).
I need to re-post ~900 posts from Tumblr, I have done ~250 so far. When over, I will likely put in on server, scheduled, to keep syncing single new posts.
This app is not meant to be used publicly, it is rather a personal utility (but the code will be posted to GitHub, should anybody need it).
This is my first experience with Facebook API and I wasn't able to find a place where I could officially address them with this question. I could proceed by doing 100 posts/day, but I'm afraid I will eventually get banned for good, even though I don't feel like doing anything wrong.
I haven't put any more code here, as the code itself does not seem to be a problem, but rather the rate at which it is executed.
So, should I proceed with 100 posts/day and hope I won't be banned, or is there another "correct" way of dealing with this?
Thanks in advance!
I'm answering a bit late but I just had this problem too so I did some research : it seems that besides the rate limits shown in Facebook docs, there's also a much more limited and opaque rate for POST requests to limit spam.
It's not clearly set but it could depend on your relationship to the page you're writing to (admin or not), if you post to multiple pages and finally if you post too quickly.
To answer the question, it seems that it would have been okay if you had done like 1 post per minute or less.
I think you exceed the rate limiting for your user Id.
- Your app can make 200 calls per hour per user in aggregate. As an
example, if your app has 100 users, this means that your app can make
20,000 calls. One user could make 19,000 of those calls and another
could make 1,000, so this isn't a per-user limit. It's a per-app
limit
- That hour is a sliding window, updated every few minutes
- If your app is rate limited, all calls for that app will be limited, not
just for a specific user
- The number of users your app has is the
average daily active users of your app, plus today's new logins
Check this: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/advanced/rate-limiting
It looks like you were misusing this feature by going too fast. You’ve been blocked from using it.
Learn more about blocks in the Help Center.
If you think you're seeing this by mistake, please let us know.
I'm looking for a graph API that returns me a list of previous name that were changed by the user.
One Way to do it manually is by going to Settings of your profile -> Download a copy of your Facebook data.
In the HTML files obtained it clearly mentions the previous names changed.
My question is there a graph API for the same ??
Thank you.
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/real-time-updates/
There are fields for name, first name and last name. You can only subscribe to updates, but afaik there is no way to get past changes. But since you are required to use your real name on Facebook, it should not happen very often - unless you marry a lot ;)
I've been exploring ways that it might be possible to promote the business of a friend of mine. One of these ways is by encouraging users to check in to his business, the incentive for this being that they go into the draw to win some kind of prize.
I've been trying to find if the code for this already exists but I might be looking in the wrong places. If it doesn't what would be the best way to do it using the graph APIs.
Thanks.
You can use Facebook app to check-in to your page/business.
All page check-ins can be fetched using following request by your code
https://graph.facebook.com/PAGE_ID/checkins?access_token=PAGE_ACCESS_TOKEN
If you want to get only specific time period check-ins use since and until params in query.
You have to parse the json response and store in an array and randomly select the winner.
you can contact the winner using their facebook id and send them a message.
You will have to write the code yourself, but it would essentially work like this:
Get the user to allow access to the "Raffle" application and get their email address and permissions to look at their check-ins. Email is required to contact the winner.
Use a scheduled script (cronjob) to periodically check if the user has checked-in anywhere (in particular, the business you want to promote).
Award a raffle ticket for each unique check-in within a 24 hour period.
Hold a draw between all the users who checked in on that day or week and award the prize to someone randomly.
Pretty simple flow, but complex code.
Small problem here. I have an event created on Facebook and am using the Graph API to get the number of attendees.
I get the list of attendees with PHP from https://graph.facebook.com/EVENTID/attending?access_token=TOKENHERE and it returns a list of names.
However, the number of attendees is about 6 people lower than what is shown on the Facebook event page. Why would these numbers not match? Is there something in particular I'm supposed to do in the code to get the entire list?
As answered in the comments:
This discrepancy is probably down to a number of the attendees having opted out of Facebook Platform, which means their data isn't passed to apps via the API. Can't be 100% sure without the Event ID, but its a likely reason. – Simon Cross
From the Graph API, the people who have not joined the event will not show up under /{eventid}/attending, you need to add in the users who are returned in /{eventid}/not_replied. The not_replied set seems to be a special set in the GraphAPI.. and if you look at the docs, there is a mention of only people who have joined the event.