I have the task to integrate some commercial sharing stuff into a website.
The idea is that the user a) logs in/registers in the website, b) the user connects his user account with his facebook account - by adding and accepting the website application.
Here comes the interesting part - is there a way of linking the facebook account with my website's account so that I can send them updates and promotions directly to their walls programatically?
In the application dialog, it's clearly noted that the user allows the application to write to the user wall so they accept and agree this. Then, for example, if I want to send them a promotion or update directly on their wall using the fb application api, how can I achieve this? All the tutorials I've read consider the user using the Facebook Login
The concrete idea is something like weekly promotion feed that my clients want to allow customers to allow being posted directly on their walls. As I don't have any experience with facebook development, I'd appreciate knowing how, if at all possible, this can be achieved?
Most of what you're suggesting is against policy, and isnt' technically possible either as users need to come back to the app once every 60 days for you to have a valid access_token for them.
The Authentication docs explain how to get access to a user's information with their permission, and the Permission documentation explains which permissions grant access to which functions or fields.
Related
In some CRM applications, I've seen functionality which looks like it is pulling FaceBook feeds for private profiles of other users/customers... how is this done? One example of this functionality is from Nimble: http://www.nimble.com/how-it-works/contact-management/
From everything I've read about the FaceBook API[s], they can only be used to pull information for the currently authenticated user or their friends, depending on the requested access. Am I simply misunderstanding the product, and it's just a mock-up showing the logged-on user's/friend's information that wouldn't actually be useful in the context of a CRM application? If not, I would like to develop a CRM tool to view the FaceBook details for any user, does anyone know where to start? Does FaceBook allow businesses to pay to access that information?
Any clarification would be appreciated.
As far as I know, you can only tag friends of the account associated with the access_token currently in use. This means that if I want to be able to make an app to share photos on facebook with a tagging functionality, it's mandatory that I make an authentication system, where the user needs to type his password to login on FB and I request and store his sixty_days_access_token. This approach is fine for web apps, but is troublesome if I have to implement a desktop touchscreen interface where the users interact with the system in an environment where anyone can watch him typing his user and password. I'm facing this problem with a public touchscreen, where the users can take pictures and send it to Facebook. The interface is implemented with C++ and the curl library. As the touch is in a very crowded environment and the screen is big, we experienced that the users are intimidated to enter his acc/pass. We worked around this problem by creating a fan page to the event where we store all the photos. As we already have the fan page admin access token stored, we don't need to login the users but clearly we are not able to tag any of the user friends, which vastly reduce the viralization potential of the solution.
So, having this problem in mind, how can I face this?
Do I really need to make an authentication of the users to be able to
tag their friends?
Is there any creative solution?
Yes, if you want to tag a user or their friends in a post, you need them to log in - this is a requirement of the Photo tagging API.
The only alternative i can think of is to give the user a URL they can go to later (e.g. on their phone or PC) which will prompt them to authorise your app and do the tagging at that time.
From the documentation it seems that the user should always authorize the Facebook application even to access basic permissions.
However, sites like Rotten Tomatoes and Clicker.com auto-authorize the logged facebook user without showing the authorization dialog. If you visit one of those sites for the first time they will be able to access your public data without you authorizing it. If I go to the Apps on my facebook settings, an entry will appear showing that I gave access to those applications (but I DID NOT).
How can this be possible? Is it related to the "Instant Personalization" feature for selected partners?
Thanks
Well, I was doing some research and yes, it's all about Instant Personalization.
From Facebook:
We've partnered with a few websites to provide you with great,
personalized experiences the moment you arrive, such as immediately
playing the music you like or displaying friends' reviews. To tailor
your experience, these partners only access public information (like
your name and profile picture) and other information you've made
public.
From one of its partners:
Clicker.com
So -at the time I'm writing this- unless you're a partner of Facebook, you'll have to show the old OAuth dialog.
Hope it helps!
This is my first post in this facebook's stackoverflow forum. My background is on wireless baseband prototyping on FPGA platform and do not have any prior experience with facebook development. Now i have a chance to work on social network related development work and i'm quite excited. Anyway above is just my background introduction.
Here i want to create a virtual Facebook user. Imagine you are interacting with your refrigerator on Facebook. This is the kind of concept we want to show.
Following are the functionality i would like to have at my virtual's facebook account..
1) recognize real friend check-in and messages posted on his/her wall.
2) ability to write messages on real friend's wall.
3) recognize messages posted on virtual account's wall.
4) ability to write message on virtual account wall.
How can the virtual account be equipped with such functionalities? Can i achieve by writing a facebook application? Please advise the direction i should look at.
Cheers,
Phone Naing
The facebook api lets you query their graph but it requires an access token to do that.
There are 3 main token types: User, Page and App.
Your app would be able to get an app token easily but it's limited to public data only, like data of public pages.
For a page and user tokens you'll need the actual user to interact with your app in order to get the token.
You can get the friends check-ins, feed, images, events and so on by asking for the right permissions from the user (there are user permissions and friends permissions).
You can also post to friends wall with the "publish_stream" permission.
For "recognizing" posted items on a user wall you can either recheck the user feed every once and a while and compare what you had and what you get or use the Real-time Updates.
With all of that said, I seriously doubt that you'll manage to pull something like that with the current limitations of the facebook api.
Let's start with the fact that facebook does not like profiles to be "vritual", they want the profiles to be of real people.
Of course that there are plenty of virtual profiles but they can remove them (and sometimes do).
Even if you do have these virtual profiles, since they are virtual they won't interact with your application using facebook, that is won't be logged in to facebook via their channels (web interface, android or iOS, etc).
Because of that you won't be able to get a user access token which you need for all of the information you want.
Since the deprecation of the offline_access permission there's no way to have a token which is valid for a user for more than about 2 months, which means that for each "virtual user" you'll need to log him in to facebook and then interact with your app to get a new token.
You can create a page instead of a virtual profile, which will also be fine with facebook.
But here again, you need a user to actually interact with facebook and your app to get a valid page access token, and even if you get that, it's not enough for the data you want to ask for.
To put it all together:
I think it can't be done.
I've done a little searching and was wondering if there is a way to link a users account in our web app with their social media accounts they choose to link (facebook, twitter, etc). i.e. when they log into our web app they are auto logged into facebook, twitter, etc?
I see facebook has an api to login to our web app using their facebook book account but I want it to work the other way around, I want them logged into facebook when they log into their account via our web app.
Thanks,
Ryan
It is definitely possible-from your question I assume you would like to pull data and make actions on behalf of a user? If so, you will need the offline_access permission as well as all the other permissions you will need (check out the list here to see exactly which ones you require). Then, you can trigger a script on your server that tell facebook as soon as the user is logged in to your site, to log in your application as the user as well.
NOTE: You might be going about this in the wrong way. I would advise that you specify a bit more details on what exactly you need the user to be logged in for, and I can (probably) provide you with a decent answer.
EDIT: In response to your question in the comment, Ryan, here is my answer:
You need to divide this problem into 2 different situations-one: your company wants you to write all the code from scratch and don't use what facebook has to offer, in which case you should create a custom login script that enables your users to use their facebook account as the Actual user account in your web app. This is the best solution in my opinion, and is supported by the ever-so-awesome Jeff Atwood. Here's a link to how to do just this, and a tutorial about this also.
Or your company is comfortable with using Facebook's Social Plugins.
Then you should focus on Like Button & Comments : These social plugins are the best way to enable people to create social experiences if they're already logged in.