Unfortunately the facebook realtime api only informs about something has changed in the friends connection of the app's users.
What do I have to do to identify that UserA has just became friend with UserX?
Currently, anytime I receive a UserA's friends have changed notification from the facebook realtime api, I receive the whole /UserA/friends.json, paging throu the whole result to just identify what has been added since the last time.
While this works, it just feels like a lot of waste in compute-cycles and I like to know if there is a more elegant approach to this...
That's the way it is designed and there is no "solution" for it.
Note that this does not include the actual data values (either from
before or after the update). To obtain those, your app can request
them as normal, subject to the usual privacy restrictions. For data
that you have access to at any time, you may wish to query for that
data immediately following this callback so that it is ready for when
the user returns to your app.
Source: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/realtime/
It makes a lot of sense, because Facebook is able to send you ALL UPDATES while not knowing if you have the appropriate permissions to get the new data, so a very easy way to do it in terms of privacy.
If you have a valid user token (in your db) you can retrieve the updated fields via Graph API / FQL and compare it with the data in your database. Without realtime API you need to pull data every x hours/days, which is even more waste of resources.
If you don't have a valid user token you can retrieve the updated fields via Graph API / FQL when the user comes back to your app and compare it with the data in your database. Without realtime API you always need to update/check the data when the user comes back.
Related
I have a WordPress webpage with posts retrieving from a public Facebook page. The FB page is not mine. However the problem is that I have millions of visitors on my Web page and every time a user visits the web page it make an API call to FB Page. Since facebook allows only a limited number of API calls in a time frame, My limit reaches instantly with such a huge number of visitors. Is there any solution to this problem. an idea in my mind is:
1. retrieve posts from Facebook and store them locally and display them every time a user visits. Is it possible? If Yes where to start ?
Or can we get more API calls by paying facebook or things like that. I am ready to pay as far as my API calls can be made sufficient for my needs.
I am open to any solution and would be very thankful for any help to resolve the problem.
There are several possible solutions to this problem
Storing responses in database
You can add a middlepoint to your requests to Facebook API using your application. This would mean that you would have a database table which stores Facebook-related information, possibly along with a lifecycle time, like:
facebook_data(user_id, lifecycle_time, ...)
Whenever you would theoretically need to send a request to Facebook API, you can check the database table to see whether the user already has a record in that table and whether it is still valid. If so, give this data to the user. If not, send an API request to Facebook and store the response in this table.
Storing responses in localStorage/memory/file
You can also store Facebook-related data in the localStorage of the web browser of the memory of an app or a file, or even a local database specific for each user. This would prevent a lot of communication and server load your app is issuing on your server(s).
Queueing user requests to be sent
If the Facebook-related data is not very urgent to your users, you can queue requests to be sent and send a single request instead of a request for each user's each visit. You can do this via a cron job.
Periodically sending requests to Facebook
You can group your users into batches and periodically update their values via Facebook and storing in your database.
Combination
Naturally, you can combine the approaches, for instance, you can store in local memory, file, or localStorage values and in the database in the same time, so first locally stored information is searched for, not needing even a request if it exists and is still valid. If not, then checking the database record and using that if it exists and is still valid. And if the data is not found in local resources, nor your database, then you can send an API request.
I am using the graph api to get data about pages and the posts in the pages.
When a post is published, it gets liked, commented upon and shared over time. When I read the data next time how can I get the posts that have those changes alone?
the best way is really to set up a server to receive real time updates. Any other way would mean polling facebook endpoints. At a certain point, a single user access token would be rate limited, and would block you from making a call for a certain amount of time. Also, there would be more work to compare each post to the one you stored to see if anything has changed.
Really the most efficient way is to use real time updates in which you set up an endpoint on your server to receive messages from facebook whenever something on a page (or user) has changed. If cost of keeping a server running is your roadblock, I would recommend to setup a free Parse.com account in which you can set up a server to handle Facebook's incoming requests and act on that.
I hope that makes sense! More information on realtime updates here: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/real-time-updates/v2.2
I want to get all of a user's friend's checkins, and be able to find out that friend's facebook id without having to make an additional request. This is only included in compact and complete user objects, not in mini user objects which are returned with checkins.
Looking through the API docs, it appears that there is no way to request specific fields, or modifications to the results. This seems silly and a bit unlikely since that wastes a ton of resources on both sides of the API, so I'm curious if there is a way to do this that hasn't been initially obvious to me.
Unfortunately cherry-picking fields you want back in a response isn't supported by the API; you'll have to make the additional request.
I am developing a iOS app, that will require the users to log in with third-party SNS account, like facebook, or twitter. However, I want to allocate "native" user id for each users for the benefits of future use.
For example, since each FB user is assigned an unique ID, say, 12345678, when this user log in with his/her FB account, I can get this FB id via FB's iOS api, then I can simply add a prefix "FB" to this id, stored a local text file with "FB12345678" as content in the i-device.
Then next time the app launches, it simply check the existence of this text file, and if not, pop out a view to require users to login, otherwise just use the content, like "FB12345678" as keyword to fetch data from my server.
Above is my own thinking. But I think there are some severe problems:
first, is it safe to store a string locally without encryption?
Second, if I use, say in the example, "FB12345678" to fetch data, is it safe to transmit via the Internet?
Chances are this " FB12345678" can be easily intercepted, and used to forge the identity of a user.
Lastly, if the user changes his/her FB password, I think my app should require the user to re-authenticate, but from the above strategy, obviously it does not work out.
So could anyone elaborate what is the most commonly used strategy, or algorithm, to enable thirdparty SNS account login? (like Instagram, Parse, etc.)
you can use the SDKs Provided by different Social Medias. It will maintain the session at your side. It is not proper to save userid on application side and other thing is that in almost all the medias you will require to send the access token and secret to request a data. and the Token Changes so its not good to save it. You can send it with your request and if it will be expired it will automatically ask you for the second time login.
please visit:
www.developers.facebook.com //for facebook
www.dev.twitter.com // for twitter
Try following links:
https://github.com/fhsjaagshs/FHSTwitterEngine
https://github.com/nov/fb_graph
hope this will help you.
Let me explain the whole thing here so you can have a clear picture of the situation:
I have a page on facebook and the insights (both on the page and from the graph api) give me a lot of valuable information, but I need to go deeper. I was thinking of applying the social network analysis concepts (centrality, betweenness, eigenvector, etc) on who likes/shares/comments on my pages posts/pics/etc, so I can find the key-users of my page and how virality spreads among them.
Lets take 'liking a post' as an example. First thing I need is to get a list of everyone who liked that post, which is simple and can be done with a few requests to the graphapi. Now comes the tricky part: I need to know the relationship between all these people who liked the post, but I don't have access to their friendlist. To have access to the friend list I'd have to make the page an app and request that permission, which can't be done at this point. But facebook api allows you to check if two individuals (user1 and user2) are friends with a request like this: user1/friends/user2, and for that I don't need special permissions, just a regular token. Well, so far so good, I just get the users who liked the post and check two-by-two which ones are friends. But here comes the problem:
I can make batch requests to the API, which means I can check 50 pairs of users with one request. And from what I read, facebook allows 600 requests each 600 seconds. Simple math: 30,000 pairs of users each 10 minutes. It's a big number, should be enough. It isn't. Let's assume that the post has 1,000 likes (not being optimistic at all). I'd have to check user1 against the other 999 users. Now user2 would have to be checked against the remaining 998 users (no need to check against user1 again, because the friend-check works both ways). User3 against 997 users and so on, until user999 needs to be checked against 1 user. Therefore I'd need to perform 999+998+997+996+...+3+2+1 checks, or 499,500 requests, which means almost 3 hours to get the data obeying facebook limitations. 10k likes would take over a week!
So my question is: is there any other way to make this work? Another way of getting data, or a largest batch request? Some way I can retrieve this data? Or it's just impossible, since facebook retains the important information?
Thank you for reading all this and helping me out ;)
What you are trying to get to is information that Facebook does not want easily available.
In the same way that you don't have access to "friends of friends", trying to reconstruct social connections takes far too many calls to the API since, as you stated, you would need to test against individual pairs.
Whilst your question is valid and from what I can tell you are not trying to obtain this data to to perform some malicious actions, I'm afraid that at this point you'll just have to use the data that Facebook makes available to you through the Insights application and the access to that data though the API as well.