Pinterest invite Facebook friends functionality is impossible? - facebook

If you connect to Pinterest with Facebook, it has multiple dialogs that show your complete list of friends (including those not using Pinterest) asking you to invite them. One is on the front page, and there is another at http://www.pinterest.com/find_friends/
This type of menu is only supposed to be possible for games that use Canvas by using the taggable_friends API, not for a website.
I see multiple questions here asking about how to do exactly what Pinterest is doing, but the response always seems to be it is impossible, the only supported way is to use the Send dialog (for a website not an app/game anyway).
It seems like they got some special permissions before from this thread: https://developers.facebook.com/bugs/146850488822600
Is their current build just another special permissions thing? I haven't been able to find anything stating that they have special permission, and it would be nice to confirm that considering it's not very convincing to say it's impossible when there's a high profile example of it.
I don't want the list to spam their friends, I still want to go through the Send dialog but it would nice to show a list of people that they can invite in a format that is shared with other social sites we have integration with.

Related

If Facebook Feed dialog is deprecated, how are you to share posts on Facebook?

I have been working on a Facebook app for some time, and we are having trouble getting the app approved. I feel like Facebook's app approval process is a constantly moving target and their explanations are provide the least amount of detail possible, leaving the door open for further rejections.
We are using a Facebook app to provide sharing functionality for products that are behind a paywall. All of our share buttons are custom, so they fit in our designs (we don't want to use the out of the box buttons). We first built the app attempting to use the recommended share dialog with open graph actions and stories. The problem here is that you can only use the share dialog with a shared link. Facebook reads any open graph tags on the page to provide sharing information, but because there are many different "products" on a given page, we can't use open graph tags. Because of our environment, we couldn't use the actions or stories. Furthermore, we'd like to customize that share information, so using share dialog is not an option.
Unfortunately, we had left our open graph stories and actions in our app when we first attempted approval. In our first denial, Facebook told us that we had implemented our open graph actions and stories incorrectly. We were not using the share dialog, but the 'feed' method, which is deprecated in 2.0 but still works. Thinking that Facebook looked at our app and noticed we were not using those actions correctly, we figured if we removed those stories and actions from the app, Facebook would see our share method worked and approve us. Wrong.
We had built the share using the publish_actions permission, along with FB.login() and FB.ui(). Facebook denied us because our app did not need publish_actions. They recommended we use the share dialog which did not need login or permissions.
We removed the publish_actions permission and FB.login(). When we tested this, you could still login to Facebook and perform the share WITHOUT fb.login(). So we thought it was good to go. It was not; Facebook told us we needed to implement login(), even thought the docs say you don't need it.
Now we have reimplemented login() and are going to try to get it approved again, but I have a feeling it's going to get rejected due to the 'feed' method being deprecated.
So my questions are:
A) If you have a website providing a paid service, how do you allow your users to post to their feeds, using the newer share method, with data you'd like? Eg: "I just completed the Get Moving III workout at teamexos.com!" The post would contain no pics or links. If it had to, a link to teamexos.com would be ok.
B) How do paid sites provide open graph actions and stories? Do they have public links to their products? Do those products have their own individual pages, with their own open graph tags?
First of all, the feed dialog is not deprecated, at least not anymore. You do not need to get anything approved for it, and you certainly don´t need login: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/reference/feed-dialog/
But: Your example looks like an Open Graph story, you should consider taking a look at those: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/opengraph

Facebook will not allow me to post to a user's wall without a dialog. How can causes.com get away with it?

I have an app that allows users to share the page to specific users by clicking on check boxes next to their name and then doing a bunch of posts. I received an alert in February that said I would not be able to post to friends' walls unless there is a dialog box.
However, I noticed if you sign a petition on Causes.com, they do something very similar where they post the petition to a bunch of friends' walls.
I'm curious how they get away with that. Maybe I'm not familiar enough with the Facebook API.
I'm not sure if this helps, but Facebook does have business partnerships with certain sites/companies that have more privileges to their api keys, facebook app. This could be one of these instances.
One instance of this is, when you go to a major site and the site is able to read your facebook session, and within that site they show your name and picture once the site is rendered. In essence, these sites already know who you are.

Script to track who is liking or sharing through Facebook

I was wondering if it's possible to find who is liking or sharing my website or facebook page by running a script. Obviously, you would have to use the Facebook API, but what I'm wondering is if it is able to do the following:
It is an incentive based share/like. I am trying to create a members section where they can share our website and receive a "credit" in their member account. Also, if they physically click the "like" button on our page, a "credit" should be updated to their account. I would need to make it so that they cannot use multiple facebook accounts to try to obtain multiple credits, but after they click the 'like' button in their account, the FB Like button should disappear, which I believe can be done through some PHP code (if).
The third "credit" they can receive would be if they 'share' our page on their own wall.
The way I see the process is that they do one of the above, and we have a cron script that runs every 5 minutes or so to check our DB of e-mails/usernames to see if they liked/shared/or liked page, then it will be an easy process to add the 'credit' automatically.
Is this possible? If so, can someone please guide me to the part of FQL that I should read on? I haven't dealt with FQL yet, but I'm sure it shouldn't be too much of a battle for something like this.
It is an incentive based share/like.
Facebook Platform Policies, IV. Application Integration Points, 1.:
“You must not incentivize users to use (or gate content behind the use of) Facebook social channels, or imply that an incentive is directly tied to the use of our channels.”
Just FYI …

Integrating facebook 'compose new message' popup into my website

I am designing a website that will be heavily integrated with facebook. Members connect to the site via their facebook accounts and facebook authentication/permission is used to access their friends list and other information.
There are instances in which I would like the site to be able to send facebook inbox messages to selected people from the user's friends list (in a user initiated manner).
I have discovered that this is not possible through facebook permissions.
One idea that I have is to have Facebook's "Compose New Message" popup to appear overlayed on top of my site (as would appear when clicking the "Send new message" button on a user's profile page). The user would then type a message and press send (hopefully circumventing the permissions issue).
I have browsed the facebook developer docs and forums, but my technical knowledge is limited. I just want to know if this is possible or not, and to be pointed in the direction of material on how this could be achieved (so that I can pass this on to hired developers once I reach that stage)
Any help or suggestions on alternatives would be gratefully received!
Pete
The closest you can be to your goal is using the Send Button. However, this button is used to share links, which are usually open graph pages. What you can to is specify a dummy href/link so that it shows a blank page. Or, better if you actually needed a link attached, then you have no problem.
There is no way of doing it using Graph API Message Object. There are no publishing rights to this object whatever permission you ask from the user. It is read-only. Just look at the extended permission it is only read_mailbox - "READ_mailbox".
Even FQL can't help us with this.
Also, facebook is in the process of migrating to a new messaging system. So playing around with is now is not advisable.
What you can do now is utilize the Send button I mentioned above.

Liking a page on behalf of a user?

I'm trying to get a user to 'Like' a page via the SDK. User is signed in and I get a valid access tokken form the cookie. My APP has asked for permissions read_stream and publish_stream. I can successfully do things like post to their wall, etc. But when my APP tries to 'Like' a page, I get the error back:
OAuthException: (#3) Application does not have the capability to make this API call.
Am I missing some other permission, or is there a setting I have to turn on in my APP? I'm at a loss here.
You can't like a Page on behalf of a user (Bugzilla discussion). You can, however, like posts, comments, and photos on behalf of a user.
Edit 7/9/2012
Since bugzilla no long exists, the bug linked above is inaccessible. Google doesn't have a cached version of the page, so I ran another search. The best thing I could come up with was this Google Code Discussion regarding the ActionScript API.
Facebook makes brief mention of Publishing likes via the Graph API in the documentation, but doesn't say one way or another whether you can like a Page on behalf of a user - just "Objects" which (probably arguably) are not "objects" in Facebook-lingo.
My thought is, the API to like page is available, but is only offered to white listed applications (such as, the Facebook iOS and Android applications) written by "special" publishers. There's obvious reasons why Facebook wouldn't want/allow developers to create like connections on the graph. It would be taken advantage of by spammers and other nefarious developers and would deteriorate the meaning of what a "like" represents for a page on Facebook.
My guess is, you'd have to make a pretty strong case to Facebook about why you need/want access to the Page's Like connection (for publishing) before they'd even consider giving you access. I'd also guess that they'd want to verify that you're doing only user initiated like creations (in such a way that the iOS application would handle it) so as to protect the reptutation/meaning of a "like" action.
Actually this is NOT true, but you have to do a complicated Javascript / UIWebView process in order to display a Facebook 'page' of JUST the like button on your view, and this like button you can configure in the JavaScript / Objective-C (using string replacement) to be any Facebook page url you like.
Facebook's platform policies don't allow for a web-based like button aside from using the officially supported options
Those options doesn't require using OAuth or the Open Graph api. However, facebook just added support for mobile apps to send like actions through opengraph.
I'm not sure if they intend to allow sites to customize their like buttons or just apps...
Liking works for me with the iOS SDK using the graph api:
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/actions/builtin/likes/