Get an embeddable link from a public Facebook post's link - facebook

Question

Question
Is it possible to get a permalink, which can be embedded successfully, to a facebook post from a link that follows the form https://www.facebook.com/{REFERENCED_PAGE_ID}/posts/{SOME_OTHER_ID} instead of the typical form https://www.facebook.com/{POSTER_ID}/posts/{POST_ID}? If so, how can it be done?
Background
Given a link such as the following (which cannot be embedded properly)
https://www.facebook.com/209447300380/posts/10153494075900381
I need to be able to programmatically produce the following link which can be embedded
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151668558417282&set=a.244117472281.146601.8128837281&type=1
Normally the solution would be to query facebook with the statement
select permalink from stream where post_id='209447300380_10153494075900381'
However this query does not produce any data for me. My suspicion is that there is a problem with the original link: 209447300380 is not the ID of the posting page, but rather, the ID of the page being referenced. In cases where 209447300380 is the ID of the posting page, I can get a permalink from Facebook without any problems.
Miscellaneous Details
I am using an application access token with the read_stream permission. It may be the case that I do not have sufficient permissions; I'm not sure.
I'm also having issues getting a permalink for user posts (posts not posted by official 'pages'). I don't know if this is relevant.

Answer 1

It looks like a bug. Getting the permalink using FQL doesn't work whereas it works with Graph API. You should use Graph API then:
https://graph.facebook.com/209447300380_10153494075900381?fields=link&access_token=YOUR_TOKEN
Result:
{
"link": "https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151668558417282&set=a.244117472281.146601.8128837281&type=1",
"id": "209447300380_10153494075900381",
"created_time": "2013-11-08T18:08:46+0000"
}
Using the Graph API won't do too much changes in your app, I guess.

Answer 2

Unfortunately we've found the most reliable way to figure out the embeddable link is simply to try to access the starting link, and then follow where it redirects to. If the redirects end at facebook.com/login, then it isn't embeddable (to the public, anyway). Otherwise, the embeddable link should eventually be reached.
C# Sample:
public static string GetPermalink (string url) {
HttpWebRequest request;
HttpWebResponse response;
request = (HttpWebRequest) WebRequest.Create (url);
request.Method = "HEAD";
request.AllowAutoRedirect = true;
request.UserAgent = "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.16 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/24.0.1304.0 Safari/537.16";
try { response = request.GetResponse () as HttpWebResponse; }
catch (WebException ex) { response = ex.Response as HttpWebResponse; }
using (response) {
string responseUri = null == response.ResponseUri ? null : response.ResponseUri.AbsoluteUri;
if (HttpStatusCode.OK == response.StatusCode) {
/* Ended at a login page. This post isn't viewable to the public. */
if (responseUri.StartsWith (#"https://www.facebook.com/login.php?") ||
responseUri.StartsWith (#"http://www.facebook.com/login.php?")) {
return null;
}
/* Found a public post. */
else return responseUri;
}
else return null;
}
}