Where are the Friendselector changes? - facebook

We are making a Facebook app and want to integrate Facebook Friendselector.
The guys who are making the app tell me that starting 1/4/2012 we can only invite 1 friend at a time. Is this true? And what can we do about it? We want to select multiple friends.

I'm not sure where those "guys" get their info, but there's nothing about this in the Developer Roadmap, or in the documentation of the Requests Dialog itself.
Maybe they were referring to the Send Dialog which indeed can only be used for one friend (though the user can then add more on his own), but even if they were talking about this dialog, then you don't have to use this one, you can stay with the Requests Dialog.

Related

Facebook app id for website social plugins

I have like/share buttons on my website and am not currently using an appid. Finding information on whether this is a necessity for the above configuration is difficult to confirm. When going through the Facebook app "create" forms, I'm really confused by a lot of the requirements as it seems to be more focused around actual apps rather than websites, which login via fb etc.
In the past I have created an app for one of my other websites and I don't believe there was any verification/submission process at this point (about 2-3 years ago). Reviewing my old app configuration now I can see that it is not "live" - does anyone know whether Facebook implemented this submission process in the last couple of years, and then de-activated any live apps that were created prior to this?
I now want to setup a new app for my new website and I'm unsure what the different 'action types' mean and what I would need to simply use like/share buttons on the website. Could someone give me a quick run down of what I'd need and what they are?
Any other info/tips people can provide would be greatly appreciated. I'm finding that the like/share DO still work without the app, but sometimes the share button doesn't work properly (I have a feeling this is something to do with the app).
Thanks
If you are just using the Social Plugins, you don't need to have a Facebook App ID.
If you want more integration, it will be required. Creating an App ID is like registering your App, wether an iOS or Android App or just a website, so that you can make Graph API calls for it.
The easiest way to register your website is to go the quickstart: https://developers.facebook.com/quickstarts/?platform=web (or https://developers.facebook.com/apps). There you can type a name and follow the steps.
You can then follow the "Sharing best practices" (https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/best-practices#tags) on how to use the App ID. For example, by including an fb:app_id meta tag on your pages.
There is a review process, since last April, but that is only needed if you use permissions for your App. If you just use the plugins, that is not needed.
Can you explain more what is exactly not working?
Update
The time you create a page the Facebook crawler does not know yet what the Opengraph data for that one is. This will happen after the first share, but if you want to ensure it is correct from the first share on, you can force a re-scrape.
This section explains how that works:
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/opengraph/using-objects#update
When an app triggers a scrape using an API endpoint This Graph API
endpoint is simply a call to:
POST /?id={object-instance-id or object-url}&scrape=true

Alternative for Facebook request for non-canvas app?

I have an app where a user creates some object and invites people to interact with it. It's not a game and it's not a canvas app.
I tried to get requests to work probably and couldn't
After reading a bit, I understood that these don't work for non-canvas apps anymore.
So...
1) Does anyone know if this is going to stick? It's extremely painful that stupid games like candy crush are allowed to create requests, while apps that might actually provide users real value can't. If there's anyone from FB here, I'd really like to understand why this discrimination is taking place?
2) Are there any alternatives? Sending a message or feed post are possible but, I need to either a) generate a unique link per invitee or b) get the list of people the user sent the link to. Both don't seem to be an option with messages and feed dialog.
3) Is is ok to just embed my web app in the canvas as is?
Thanks
Yaron
Facebook policy indicates that you should not use app requests to send users to an external website. However, an embedded web canvas app is fine. It will let you use the apprequests function to render the Request Dialog and provide a user invite experience similar to the most popular Facebook games.

Facebook API/Dialogue for Un-Friending people?

Preface
I'm aware a similar question has been asked before, but I believe my request is slightly different so I'm going to go for it anyway.
Existing Questions/Findings
I have read the following articles on SO already:
Unfriending someone through the Facebook API?
Any way to unfriend or delete a friend using Facebook's PHP SDK or API?
Previous queries have focussed mainly on silent/programatic un-friending of a user. I don't necessarily need it to be silent and would be quite happy to use a prompted dialogue box.
Is there anything even close to this, or some hack around I could use?
In one of the articles above, an app is mentioned Burger King 'Whopper Sacrifice' which did unfriend I believe. The reason for it being shut down appears to be the privacy invasion/publicising of the un-friending (which seems a bit harsh!) rather than the un-friending itself.
Example idea/Summary
I am looking for some way to simply (either using or not using a prompt) help the user unfriend someone.
As an example, do you think it would be possible to use some kind of call to an iframe to bring up the dialogue?
No, there's no API or Dialog for this functionality. Users can use Facebook's own interface to remove friends but not via 3rd party apps.
Side note, the user can unfriend someone from that person's timeline, if you want one of your users to unfriend someone for some reason, just link them to that timeline and give them the 'unfriend' instructions
There is only way to add user as friend (Friends Dialog) but not terminate friendship, there is no such functionality in API or SDK-s Facebook provide.

Accessing checkboxes with faces when using Facebook "send" button

I've messed around with FBML (deprecated, I know) and the newer HTML5 code to no end, but so far I haven't found any way to do what I'm looking to do.
When using "apprequest" within an application on Facebook (within iframe), I can allow users to share requests to join the app, but those messages that get sent are very hidden away. They don't seem to appear in the newsfeed for shared recipients, and we're afraid users won't see the request from their friends.
Instead, we thought we'd allow users to alternatively share to their friends with the "send" button code that Facebook offers up. This allows us to specify a URL (we were thinking the app canvas URL or page tab it would live on).
So far, this is all I could generate...
Is there any way to have the send code let me specify that we want faces with checkboxes for uses to select their friends, instead of a sharing party needing to type out names of their friends by hand? There's got to be some easy way of doing this.
Stop me if you think I'm going in the wrong direction on this. Maybe there's a better way that I'm simply not thinking of.
Here's an example of the checkbox functionality I'm referring to...
This violates the browser security model and also Facebook's policies, you can include a to parameter with the send dialog to preselect one recipient, but you can't modify the browser DOM because the Facebook dialog is in an iframe

Send message to a non-friend facebook user?

I am developing a Facebook application. It must notify random people on Facebook about a certain event that happens related to them. I mean random people - not just those who installed the app, that's a key point.
Yeah I know it sounds like a spammy annoying application, but I swear, it's not that kind that everyone hates. :)
Is there a way to send anything (wall post? message?) to a user that did not previously installed the app?
No, that's not possible as per facebook's privacy policy. There should be some sort of connection like friendship/application user to do this.
It is possible, but only if you direct the acting user to the send message URL in a new window. If you are talking about an automated way, it is not technically possible at the moment.
It is possible through request dialog api: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/dialogs/requests/