I'm sure some of you have seen this viral Facebook post going around. How it works is you enter your birth year into the comments like #[1988:] and it will give you a name. I am stumped trying to figure out how they are able to change the users comment programmatically. The Facebook API doesn't really provide any documentation on how this is done and the thing I don't understand is how its able to work without any of the users permissions? Is this even an app or some Facebook easter egg? Any ideas?
They're not doing anything and this isn't API usage either; that's Facebook's standard method for tagging in plain text posts - #[4:] for example will show Mark ZUckerberg's profile pic - it also works in chat
It works with 'birth years' because the first few hundred user IDs are mostly in use, because when Facebook first launched it incremented new uids from 4 upwards.
Related
I'm working on a classified ads site that works with FB sdk. To upload a classified ad, the user must give permission to the SDK application. After creating a classified ad, fb comments shown below it. What I need is that when someone makes a comment, he gets a notification to ad owner with a link to the site. This is possible?
I hope you can help me, some days ago I'm looking for a solution and I can not find it.
may be the real time updates may help here facebook real time api. Though i am not able to find the functionality as such.
You can come up with something of the sort.
At the end of the day or low load times you can traverse all the shared posts for new comments in that day. If there was a comment you can extract that and send that to admin of that ad on his email.
I plan to start a Facebook contest where the user is first asked to like the page, then they submit their email to enter the contest.
I checked out other contest examples on:
http://contests.about.com/od/facebookcontests/tp/Facebook-Contests-and-Facebook-Sweepstakes.htm
Most Facebook pages direct a user to a "Like this page to continue" page. I tried to google around to find how this is done, but I cannot find anything. I tried to find ways to track specific user's likes,
For contest-specific legal reasons, I cannot use an app that makes the contest and keeps track of the entries. So I will need to create this from scratch.
I have made other apps before, and I do have access to an external server where I plan to create a page and link to it from facebook for the 'frame' type app.
Is there a standard way of doing this? Is there a documentation that I have yet to find?
Thanks
(Me answering my own question)
Some more googling I was able to find:
How to check if current facebook user like a page using PHP SDK?
A php version of the same question.
In that case, I will be able to check out FQL's documentation to find out how to get this information.
I really don't want a permission popup from facebook to pop up, and I don't think I will need that to make this work. I will try that and add a comment to this answer if it works just like what I'm looking for.
Last time I got the way to know how many users liked a photo with this way:
https://graph.facebook.com/161820597180936/likes?limit=1000
But I don't know why it doesn't work anymore. Now it only returns 3 or 4 facebook users in the case they work very well before. It happened 2 days ago, so I guess facebook changed something in it's API. Any suggestions on how to solve this problem?
This is a bug in the Graph API, and should eventually be fixed by Facebook.
Facebook has pledged to provide 90 day notifications before making breaking changes to the API, so it is important to file bugs even if you assume that a change was intentional but there was no prior notification.
Now it comes back as a part of the Graph API data set.
Look at the page - https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/ - for what the API header is, and then under the photos, it'll show you the data set that gets returned from the photo api request - (PHP example - https://graph.facebook.com/98423808305)
Hope that helps.
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.
I ask because some of my users have made complaints that they want their comments sent to friends to look authentic. Thank you.
Well... I looked into this and it is not possible via the API. For anyone else out there struggling with this issue here are the different advices I've uncovered:
You can set your logo to a white box which hides that visual element from the Via line.
You can ask your users for their username/password and scrape/post data as you wish, but use the FB App as a jump-off for user buy-in.
You can pick the most subtle name possible. Today, FB requires 6 or 7 characters for the app name.