I am building a social application, users post data to the website, which is saved in our database.
This creates a record on the site, which is searchable and creates the basic content and function of the site (the purpose is not relevant at this point)
When a record is saved to our database, I want to "spread the word" and send this data out to social networks. Currently, I'm looking at Facebook in isolation.
So, I know how to create a post through the Graph API and post this content to the users Timeline, or indeed to a business page associated with the APP/Website.. but I am not sure how, or if indeed one should, maintain continuity.
What I mean... if a user creates a record on my website, and then the website/App creates a post on my business page, and also asks the user to post it in their Timeline, how do I stop this being two separate posts, and instead one post which has been shared?
I want to achieve:
User posts on website
>
Website posts to Page
>
Post on Page is "Shared" to users Timeline
As opposed to:
User posts on website
>
Website posts to Page
>
Website posts an additional post to users Timeline
The reason I want to do this, is that on the website, I want to be able to show shares, likes and comments from Facebook by tracking the ID of the initial post created when first entered onto my website.
Or am I trying to reinvent the wheel and should just use Facebook's comment plugin?
When you create the post on facebook on the Page, store the returned post ID in your data model.
From what I can tell, there is no way to access the normal user share directly through the API. If you insist on doing it programmatically without popping up any dialog for your user, you can make a post to the user's page which has (the start of) the Page post and a linkback to the Page post as an attachment. This is probably to prevent abuse.
However, if you don't mind relying on an undocumented and deprecated endpoint, you can use the old sharer.php endpoint, so long as you have a fully qualified link to the post you want to share (you can retrieve the url through the api). This will also require your user to enter anything appropriate in their share and then click "share."
The endpoint is
http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php
Call it with the u parameter filled in with the url, so
http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=[URL encoded URL of the post you wanted to call]
You can try this with any facebook post (go to a post, copy the url, past in as the parameter), it's still working (I just tried it) but there are no guarantees. See the top answer to Facebook API: "Share" a post already posted on a page's wall?.
You can still access likes, comments, etc for that post id through the Graph API (and you can provide your users a direct link to the post). Cache/update them as recommended and display them on your own page. You are basically mirroring back onto your own site what is happening on facebook in regards to the post you made.
I would go this route especially if you are at all planning on branching into other services. That way you can do an aggregated display of statistics/likes/etc from the multiple services you are having your platform repost to. This is also good for (at least an impression of) data integrity for your users: they know that your service represents everything they have done in case anything happens to their facebook/etc accounts.
This could especially be noteworthy if they are worried about facebook/etc deleting any of their posts, or for recovering from any issues where a post/comment/etc is not properly stored by facebook/etc (for example, comments have a maximum length which, at least via the main FB UI, silently drops anything above the maximum length in a non recoverable way for the user).
Related
I've written a Facebook web application, which is able to post links to the app page feed (as the page) by requesting the page token and doing a post request to the /PAGE_ID Graph REST endpoint. So far, so good, but I'd like to tag the links with their authors as well. When I add the tags parameter to this request with a value of my user id (I am an admin of the page), this works fine. But when I enter another user id (even one that likes the app page), no tagging is done. Does anyone have any experience with this? Some blog post suggest this is not possible using the Graph API, even though this is possible when done manually.
Thanks!
If I understand correctly what you want to do, it is no longer possible with the new version of the Facebook's API (v.2.0).
Refer to this page for more informations.
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.
I'm planning on launching a website and an accompanying facebook page. Although each of these 'sites' will have their own goal, I'd like to have a 2-way sync set-up for part of the user generated content on my site, such that:
Content published on my site (by editors, or users) that satisfies some criteria are pushed to the wall of the accompanying facebook page
The other way around: content published on the facebook page wall by users, is pushed to my website. (I want to be in complete control of how to format, display, annotate that content, so I'm not looking for some ready-made widgets)
For 2. I'm pretty sure I can poll for a newsfeed or channel of the specific facebook page at regular intervals, but I'm wondering if a tighter integration is possible, i.e: pushing the changed content(delta's, river whatever you want to call it) to a dedicated rest-endpoint from which my website can consume the contents or something.
For 1. I need an automated way to post to the wall of the facebook page I own. Preferrably with the user-credentials (if okayed by the user) if that user was logged-in on my site through Facebook, or otherwise with some fallback credential, e.g: my own facebook credentials.
Just looking for some pointers where to start looking in the vast Developer Facebook resources, or, better yet, some libraries (prefferably Node.js, but others are okay to look at architecture) that take care of some of the plumbing
1) You can post on page with different ways
as a user : You need user access token and he should be a fan of the page or If your fan page allows wall posts from any user in its settings.
as a page : You need page access token
You can get page access token and extend it for long time and store it in DB. You can use it 60 days.
FYI:
Extended access token
Tutorial
2) Using graph API you can pull at regular intervals. There is a real time notification system also but it very limited for pages (its not useful for your case).
FYI: Real Time Updates
I'd like to know if there is a possibility to check (using Graph API or any other way) whether given user likes / shares a specific link. Probably I'll have this user's facebook ID or facebook login, but my site is non-Facebook application. Actually it's Dot Net Nuke portal (target: .NET with MS SQL Server) with part of it being avaliable as Facebook app, but certainly not greater part of it, so the solution should be out of Facebook Connect, although it's not a showstopper if it's necessary.
We'll be giving points to users who share/like most of links that we serve in our portal and such possibility would be a great help to make a ranking.
Another option we consider is making some kind of "wrapper" or proxy for FB like / share buttons which will at first save some data in our database (probably - this user clicked on like for this link) and then go on with standard FB like / share route. Did anybody of You tried such solution?
If You have any other suggestion on the subject, please, post them, we'll be really thankful.
It is possible to know if a user has LIKED a site or not. You can get all user's likes with Graph API (you need user_likes permission). Take a look at the docs: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/user/
I'm not sure if you can know if he has shared your site, but you could try by parsing his wall with the read_stream permission and then look for your site name/URL post by post.
For just general liking of items on your site, you can use a Facebook Social Plugin. However, you won't be able to associate (or really even access) user activity with users on your site without integrating Facebook Connect and creating a Facebook application for your site. At that point you can design with greater control all the possible user activity and interleave with your facebook calls other calls that affect users' accounts on your site.
I've been looking at the Facebook API to find some way to edit a user's Likes (that is, add or remove items from https://graph.facebook.com/me/likes/). The API doesn't say anything about it specifically, but does say this:
You can publish to the Facebook graph by issuing HTTP POST requests to the appropriate connection URLs above.
Where above, one of the connection URLs is the aforementioned https://graph.facebook.com/me/likes link. However, there's no documentation for the PROFILE_ID/likes post, and whenever I try to post it returns the error "invalid post_id".
I assume this is because to like something, you post a request to POST_ID/likes. It's a bit inconsistent. What I'm trying to do is get the user's profile to add a Page to their likes (by posting using the page's id as an "id" parameter in the post body). However, it seems like there's just no way to edit user's likes.
At the end of the day, I just want to allow a user to click a button in my application (mobile device application, not a web app) and have them add our Facebook page into their list of pages, and I've found no way of doing that short of presenting our page to them and making them click on the "Like" button manually. Many other things are supported without showing the Facebook website, like posting to their wall or making albums, but I can't find anything to do this.
Any ideas?
Looks like I can't. Not in the way I want to anyway.