My latest project has (had) a requirement for the user to invite their friends to their online service. I discovered that, apparently, as of April 2015 with the new v2.0+ Facebook Graph API, you cannot actually get a list of friends for the user, unless those friends are already subscribed members of your app.
The scenario:
My app is a web service that lets the user collaborate on research work in a private group online. The user needs to
look up their list of friends,
set permissions their friend will have in the group, and
send them an invitation both join the service, and the specific group. (using a unique, one-time use link tied to each recipient)
The user would (ideally) receive an invitation with a specific link for them to not just become a subscriber of said online app, but specifically to join the group they were invited to (i.e. not just a generic "hey, check out this app" type of invitation).
The expectation:
The user doesn't care whether their friend is already a member of "MyApp.com". They expect to simply look up their friends just like they do today from their phone when they connect it to Facebook (makes all contacts available, regardless of whether those friends connected their Facebook to their phone, respectively). Likewise, compare inviting members to your Google docs, for example: look up your contact, set permission, send invite - so easy. Users demand this UX simplicity today and do not distinguish or care whether they are dealing with email, Facebook, Twitter contacts, whatever.
The problem:
The entire point of a social network is to be, well, social. If the Graph API only lets my app access friends that are ALREADY users of my app, it completely defeats the entire purpose - it cuts my user off at the knees, kills UX, no more ability to actually contact their own friends. My understanding is Facebook made this change to prevent developers from spamming users, and I get that, I completely support that. HOWEVER, my company and my app are not the ones that are trying to invite friends for it's own purposes, it is the USER and THEIR OWN friends that THEY have the right to access and converse with for their purposes (or so you'd think). Beyond just friends list, even if I had that, I think there are additional hurdles and limitations with posting messages to friends, even private (not wall) messages, which again would be anti-social.
The Question:
Am I understanding Facebook limitations properly, and if so, what is the work-around? I'd be ok with such an API being locked down until you pass a review that proves you aren't spamming users, but I did not see such an option.
Facebook supposedly prioritizes users over developers, and these changes were made because if the user is not comfortable with privacy (don't spam my friends), then they wont be users any longer, and that obviously affects developers and Facebook. OK, but did they not realize that by locking it down this extreme just killed UX for the user in legitimate scenarios? And to my original point, not just a little, but paramount - the result quite literally is that on April 30, 2015, Facebook became anti-social. Surely this is not inline with their mission. Surely there is a better approach.
If your app is not a game (which I assume), the only viable option would be the Message Dialog as desribed at
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/apps/faq#friend_invite
If your app is not a game and has a mobile or web presence:
You can also use the Message Dialog on iOS and Android, or the Send Dialog on Web. These products let a person send a message directly to their friends containing a link to your app. This type of message is a great channel for communicating with a smaller number of people in a direct way. The Message Dialog and the Send Dialog both include a typeahead which lets the person easily select a number of friends to receive the invite.
You might also find App Invites useful but I beleive it's only for iOS and Android apps and might not exactly fit your use case:
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/app-invites
App Invites are a content-rich, personal way for people to invite
their Facebook friends to a mobile app.
Related
Would it be possible to have an app that returns the friends of friends of the current user that have the app installed? I understand that this may be impossible due to privacy issues, but is there not some sort of requirement that can be imposed when the app is installed to make this information public to everyone and so to the current user?
EDIT:
In fact, users will be entered into my own database so what I really need to be able to do is search through all of a user's friends and for each one query whether they have any friends who match a name/id in my database.
Nope, apps can only access information for friends of the current user, but not for friends of those friends again.
Otherwise, the “operating distance” of an app could be quite huge, without people even knowing what way an app was able to get access to their information (or that it even did get access at all) – look at it this way:
If you do not want to generally disallow apps to access some of your info when friends are using them, because it has some (social) benefits from your standpoint, but you have this weird guy/girl amongst your friends, who’s using sh*tloads of apps and giving them friends-permissions all the time … well, no problem, unfriend him/her, and all’s well. But now let’s say, that guy/girl/dude/whatever is not directly friends with you, but only with your younger brother (who you’re FB friends with in this scenario, of course) – you’d have to actually unfriend your brother for this to stop … and, not knowing your little brother (or whether you even have one) – I’d still guess this would not be what most Facebook users would want.
This is my first post in this facebook's stackoverflow forum. My background is on wireless baseband prototyping on FPGA platform and do not have any prior experience with facebook development. Now i have a chance to work on social network related development work and i'm quite excited. Anyway above is just my background introduction.
Here i want to create a virtual Facebook user. Imagine you are interacting with your refrigerator on Facebook. This is the kind of concept we want to show.
Following are the functionality i would like to have at my virtual's facebook account..
1) recognize real friend check-in and messages posted on his/her wall.
2) ability to write messages on real friend's wall.
3) recognize messages posted on virtual account's wall.
4) ability to write message on virtual account wall.
How can the virtual account be equipped with such functionalities? Can i achieve by writing a facebook application? Please advise the direction i should look at.
Cheers,
Phone Naing
The facebook api lets you query their graph but it requires an access token to do that.
There are 3 main token types: User, Page and App.
Your app would be able to get an app token easily but it's limited to public data only, like data of public pages.
For a page and user tokens you'll need the actual user to interact with your app in order to get the token.
You can get the friends check-ins, feed, images, events and so on by asking for the right permissions from the user (there are user permissions and friends permissions).
You can also post to friends wall with the "publish_stream" permission.
For "recognizing" posted items on a user wall you can either recheck the user feed every once and a while and compare what you had and what you get or use the Real-time Updates.
With all of that said, I seriously doubt that you'll manage to pull something like that with the current limitations of the facebook api.
Let's start with the fact that facebook does not like profiles to be "vritual", they want the profiles to be of real people.
Of course that there are plenty of virtual profiles but they can remove them (and sometimes do).
Even if you do have these virtual profiles, since they are virtual they won't interact with your application using facebook, that is won't be logged in to facebook via their channels (web interface, android or iOS, etc).
Because of that you won't be able to get a user access token which you need for all of the information you want.
Since the deprecation of the offline_access permission there's no way to have a token which is valid for a user for more than about 2 months, which means that for each "virtual user" you'll need to log him in to facebook and then interact with your app to get a new token.
You can create a page instead of a virtual profile, which will also be fine with facebook.
But here again, you need a user to actually interact with facebook and your app to get a valid page access token, and even if you get that, it's not enough for the data you want to ask for.
To put it all together:
I think it can't be done.
I am a programmer employed by a company to develop a web app owned by that company. We allow users to log in with Twitter. We would like to allow users to log in with Facebook. For this we require tokens to plug in to OAuth 2.
The snag is that so far as I can determine, Facebook require that apps are owned by a Facebook user, and a that Facebook user uniquely identify a natural person. I don’t want to register using my existing Facebook ID; my work identity is not relevant to friends and family, and besides, I will not be an employee of the company indefinitely. I have not found any information yet to indicate I can hand the ownership of the app to another developer, though I assume such a process must logically be required. I could violate the Facebook terms and create a new ID to register the app with, or I could attempt to coach the CEO of the company (who is not a programmer) through the process of registering for an app. This will be complicated by the fact that I can’t even get past step 1 so I can’t rehearse the process.
So my programming question is, is there a way I have not yet discovered that Facebook allows companies to delegate the chore of registering an app? Failing that, has anyone published a route through Facebook’s developer’s maze to get the OAuth keys in the minimum of steps?
You can create the app using your facebook account, initially, then you can create a Facebook Group called something like "My App Admins" - then get anybody who is important in the company to join that Facebook Group (including yourself) Then in the app settings, set that group as an admin of the app. (you can also create seperate groups for insights users, developers and testers)
Anybody in that group will now be an administrator. That way the company can control access to the app by adding or removing people from that group.
It is not an ideal solution. Facebook want to be able to link application developer accounts to real people - this is a way of preventing spamming etc.
Hope this is helpful.
We have created an invite function at our site in JavaScript using the Graph API where users can invite their Facebook friends to our site. The users invited then get an invite post at their wall on Facebook.
This has been workling fine until suddenly one day the messages did not show up on the invited users wall. We even still get post sucess messages from Facebook and a Post ID.
Also, we nocticed that old invite posts were removed as well from the Faceook walls. However, other functions with the same app ID still work.
When we created a new Facebook app with a new Facebook app ID the invite functions work like normal again.
As far as we know we arent breaching any rules or regulations, and we havent been notified by Facebook (although we are quite active with FB ads).
Is there some risk Facebook have blocked our app without telling us? Can they block our domain if we continue? Are there any general rules when it comes to invite? Any tips?
Facebook has many anti-spam policies and procedures in place. If a high enough percentage of users delete the post that gets added to their wall or mark it as spam or choose to hide all posts from your application, the application will get removed and the posts removed as you have experienced. They may or may not email you to warn you.
Facebook has a high level guide to follow:
Create a great user experience
Build social and engaging applications
Give users choice and control
Help users share expressive and relevant content
Be trustworthy
Respect privacy
Don't mislead, confuse, defraud, or
surprise users
Don't spam - encourage authentic
communications
I am guessing they are flagging your account for not helping users share expressive and relevant content (I am guessing they don't get to type the message that gets shared on friends wall), as well as obviously for spam.
If you want to invite users, I would suggest using the supported method for this, the Facebook requests dialog, and move away from posting (spamming) other friends walls, as they most likely can ban your whole website or account if you keep doing what you are doing.
I'm considering developing an app that asks users to invite friends to participate at first launch, using the Request dialog. (The Request dialog would have a prominent Skip button, in agreement with Facebook policy IV.4.)
Browsing this forum, it appears that there USED to be a "Developer Policy V.4" which, at one time, said this: "You must not prompt users to send invitations, requests, generate notifications, or use other Facebook communication channels immediately after a user allows access or returns to your application."
I no longer see language like that in the policies available here: http://developers.facebook.com/policy/
Does this mean that prompting users to send invitations at first launch is now allowed? Or am I simply overlooking some language in the new policies that forbids this?
I believe this was removed intentionally, as it clearly isn't in their updated developer policies. The only mention of that old policy I can find is here. That post also gives a good reasoning for the old policy:
When a user -- whether returning or
new -- visits your application, you
must allow the user to engage with
your application before asking him/her
to publish a stream story, send out
Requests, or use any other
communication channel. The intention
behind this policy is to give users
the opportunity to meaningfully
interact with an application before
being faced with the decision of
whether to communicate with friends.
The advice is still valid even if the policy is no longer in place - that you should give the user a chance to use and learn about your application before being prompted to share it. However, if you are building a game like Words With Friends where you need to play against one of your Facebook friends, then I think it would be fine (almost necessary) to invite friends right away, and this may be why Facebook removed this from their policy.
I think you will be fine if you prompt a user to send friend invites immediately, provided its not for the purpose of spamming other people to get them to use your app and that you provide a skip option.
Also, its sad that its near impossible to get a response from Facebook like you have seen with their forums.