I have a question about weather something is or is not possible with Facebook's API.
Can a server side script have access to a users account and remove a tag associated with another person? Or remove photos that has a particular friend in it (obviously only if the person has been tagged)?
For instance maybe I want to remove all connections I have with another person, can the Facebook API graph allow me to do so if I specify the individual?
I am not looking for how to do so, I am first trying to find out if this is even possible. I have been pouring over documentation but it is something that I do not completely understand and I will not be the one writing code.
Any help or direction will be great, thanks!
No you can't unfriend a person through the API. Even deleting photos is impossible, unless the app created the photos in the first place. There are numerous other threads on SO about this, as well as forums posts about people that have struggled with problems in the recent past. You can't even delete a tag of a photo through the API even though DELETE methods exist in the documentation and indicate that it should work. When making the calls people receive oauth error results, and there is probably still a pending bug report about this behavior, but no expectation that FB plans to fix it anytime soon.
In general they are happy to let you add a lot of content, but they don't want to let you remove it -- and that goes double for the API.
Related
From my understanding Facebook has made changes to their API such that third-party services can no longer have access to the friend list (at least names) of someone using your app (while being logged in facebook, of course).
Does anyone know if I maybe just missed one API endpoint, and it is still somehow possible? I just know that the original one is deprecated/has been removed. Thank you.
(Wasn't sure where to ask this, so I turned to stackoverflow. I know it's not the best use of the site, I apologize for that.)
No, you did not miss anything, accessing the friend list is no longer possible. You can only get data of users who authorized your App too, every other user is not available at all - for privacy reasons.
I have an app that analyzes text comments and figures out the personality out of it. I'd like to integrate Facebook in it, but when checking the user_status permission, I read:
(OK) Provide creative content from status updates.
(OK) Provide value to the user by visibly analyzing the content of their past statuses.
(Not OK) Non-visible use of this data such as sentiment analysis or
guarding against spam bots.
The app will show the user their personality. It analyzes the content of their past statuses and provide value to the person, they know something more about their personality and, depending on which category they fall, they will see a picture and a brief description of it.
I'm not sure about the last point, does my work count as doing "sentiment analysis"? The use of this data is completely shown to the user.
I was wondering this because I couldn't find any app that do this after the recent changes of last April in Facebook.
Since to request the permission Facebook wants to see everything in action, knowing this is not permitted at all in advance will save me some coding.
Thank you!
Not sure how to properly answer my own question, with the answer coming from another website, but I got a very kind feedback from David Doyle on the "Facebook Developer Community" group on Facebook.
We see a lot of apps that do or claim to do similar to what you're looking for. Permissions can be approved in these cases if the content is clearly influenced by the information a permission provides, is clearly visible to people using the app and results vary based on the information provided.
Where some apps might fall down with requests like this is claiming "the answer is custom based on your user_status" but in reality, the answers are always the same - or there's a core set of answers that are rotated and the information provided from login are never used in the app.
Hope this makes things a bit clearer!
Then he added
What I mean by clear visibility is that if I'm a person signing into your app I should know why you're asking me for user_status.
When I get my result, I should know how my status information contributed to it.
Permalink to the discussion, if you're in the Facebook group: link
I am working on some project that needs that when ever a friend of mine unfriends me from his list I gets notified so that I update the list of my friend list, one way of doing it is I can schedule a cron job and that will update my friend list once or twice in a day in my project, but that is not going to be real time, I searched the internet but did not finds any thing in fact may be I am struggling with some different keywords and may be that particular thing is termed differently, please shed some light since I am new in facebook api thing I am struggling with the internet false posts as well.
Thanks in advance
Ankur
As in #Igy's comment, what you are asking for is exactly what Facebook is highlighting as a "Prohibited Functionality":
Revealing Friend Removals
You must not include features or functionality that disregards or circumvents Facebook product
limitations. For example, you must not notify a user if someone
removes the user as a friend because Facebook does not publish this
information to users
I have recently been looking into adding Facebook Insights into one of our client's websites (www.mcvuk.com). I've created an app to associate with this and added the necessary Facebook meta tags to my site which reference the app id.
I was, until today, having issues adding the app domain information to https://developers.facebook.com/apps but have added this information in today.
My question is how long does it take before you will start to see results filter through for the site and is there any way of checking that everything has been set up correctly?
It might not be a matter of time, it might be a matter of how many 'likes' the app or page has. At least for pages, it tells you "Once 30 people like your Page, you'll get access to insights about your activity."
That's an interesting point.
It all depends on which metrics (results) you're after and how much traffic your app gets.
Additionally, you might want to look at facebook documentation for the metrics (results) you're looking for -- some of them are available monthly or weekly, others are a lifetime aggregate, and some are daily.
The easiest way to test would be to ask some of your friends to do whatever it is you want to test (comment on a post, link to a page, etc.).
I hope that answers some of your questions.
When my Facebook app posts to the users stream those posts do not get links for Like and Comment. Other Facebook publishing apps, like Instagram, get these links.
I can't find it in my Facebook application's settings. Anyone knows how to do it?
(I think this is the same question as this one: Facebook : Like and Comment Functionality against Wall Post but I'm not sure.)
See Traroth's comment to get a more to the point description of what it is I'm asking about.
It seems Nathat Totten is right about how these links are defaults and that they are controlled by Facebook. There are three things that confuses this issue.
One is that Facebook Test Users behave a bit more special than you might think. Even when they are friends, they are not fully so. Making these default links turn up only for the user that posts them (for Test Users, mind you, I'm hoping it'll work all right for real users).
Another is the documentation for actions in the Facebook Graph API documentation for publishing Post objects:
A list of available actions on the post (including commenting, liking, and an optional app-specified action). read_stream. A list of JSON objects containing the 'name' and 'link'.
Which made me start to try find out how to include the commenting and liking links myself. I can't find this info anywhere, so maybe that changed without the above quoted documentation reflecting the change.
Anyway, if, indeed this is a Test User issue, then I don't need to do anything special to fix this. I'll try to remember to come back here when my (iPhone) app is ready for the real Facebook world and I get to see if it works in that environment or not.