Using Facebook's Graph API, I am currently looping through all friends to retrieve their videos, and then present a list of these videos to the user. It obviusly takes a while to do this depending on number of friends,
Is there any way to just say to FQL - give me all videos that I have permsission to view?
Facebook doesn't want applications to be able to "mine data". They don't want applications to be able to collect that much data on anything they want. In most cases an ID must be specified.
User ID
Page ID
Group ID
Event ID
etc...
Even in such a case there is also limitations and multiple calls will have to be made. The limitations themselves are not only limited to accessing data with FQL or the Graph API.
There are also limitations on your access to the API. This is called application throttling and it can be enforced on your application if they find you doing an abnormally large amount of calls to the API. There are also other limitations such as making multiple sequential posts or even duplicate posts to your users.
I'm afraid that the answer is no.
Just playing around with the graph API explorer:
http://developers.facebook.com/tools/explorer?method=GET&path=fql%3Fq%3DSELECT%20vid%2C%20owner%2C%20title%2C%20src%20FROM%20video%20WHERE%20owner%3Dme%28%29
I know that to get a list of my friends I can do:
SELECT uid2 FROM friend WHERE uid1=me()
I then updated the video query to:
http://developers.facebook.com/tools/explorer?method=GET&path=fql%3Fq%3DSELECT%20vid%2C%20owner%2C%20title%2C%20src%20FROM%20video%20WHERE%20owner%20IN%20%28SELECT%20uid2%20FROM%20friend%20WHERE%20uid1%3Dme%28%29%29
And now I get a paginated list of all videos belonging to my friends. This one query is certainly better than pounding the API to death with multiple calls. :)
Related
I'm using Facebook graph Api to search users and data that i get is kinda different from that i get from Facebook UI. For example search response of User interface is friends, mutual friends and other related data in first. How can i query to get related data for current user ( i.e friends and mutual friends in first place).
Here is query that i'm using to search users.
https://graph.facebook.com/v2.5/search?fields=id,name,picture.type(normal)&limit=50&q={q}&type=user&access_token={token}
and data that i get is kinda different from that i get from Facebook UI
That’s because those are two completely different things.
The search functionality offered via the UI is called Graph Search. But the powerful possibilities that offers are not exposed via API. (To protect user privacy, and keep apps from doing extended user profiling via that data.)
Searching via API is limited to what is listed here: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/using-graph-api/#search
That’s not much – but it’s all you get.
I'm using Facebook graph Api to search users and data that i get is kinda different from that i get from Facebook UI. For example search response of User interface is friends, mutual friends and other related data in first. How can i query to get related data for current user ( i.e friends and mutual friends in first place).
Here is query that i'm using to search users.
https://graph.facebook.com/v2.5/search?fields=id,name,picture.type(normal)&limit=50&q={q}&type=user&access_token={token}
and data that i get is kinda different from that i get from Facebook UI
That’s because those are two completely different things.
The search functionality offered via the UI is called Graph Search. But the powerful possibilities that offers are not exposed via API. (To protect user privacy, and keep apps from doing extended user profiling via that data.)
Searching via API is limited to what is listed here: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/using-graph-api/#search
That’s not much – but it’s all you get.
I want to find the list of all facebook users who attended a particular college using fql.
Is that possible?. If yes then, how do I write that query?.
It appears that this is not possible, looking both at FQL and the Graph API documentation. I don't even believe there's an easy way to get a list of fans of the page. The most obvious reason for them preventing this is to prevent marketers from getting lists full of personal information to use for sending promotions or offers (spam).
I am developing a social media monitoring application. Currently, we are entering Facebook page ids into the application to collect data from possible customers' Facebook walls (so we have a realistic sample for the customer for direct promotion).
These page ids are used to collect wall postings and comments and to compute statistics (e.g. to show most used words), and are presented to the user in a special view. Requirements are to collect all postings and comments without exception in near-live time. We currently have about 130 page ids in the system, with more to come.
Right now, I am using the Graph API for this, with several disadvantages:
FB API access is restricted to 600 request/10 minutes. To get a near-live view, I need to access the API at least each two hours. As we are using API requests in other parts of the program, too, it is obvious that the limit is hit sooner or later (actually, this already happens)
The responses are mostly redundant: to receive current comments, I have to request the wall postings (comments are enclosed in postings) with the URL http://graph.facebook.com/NAME/feed...
The probability for hitting the limits is dependent on the number of postings on the several walls
I cannot get all comments with this method (e.g. comments on postings some time ago)
I am currently trying out how to switch to (or to complement Graph API usage) using FQL by querying the stream and the comment tables but this also has limitations:
I cannot restrict my query to a specific timespan, leading to redundancy again
The max number of posts I am getting for each one of my 130 page ids is 61 - (why 61?)
I need an unpredictable number of additional requests because I need to get special objects like videos and links in separate requests.
My question now is - if anyone is doing similar things: How did you solve these problems? How do you get a pseudo-live-stream of a larger number (up to, say 1,000) of walls?
Letting the customer grant extra permissions to us is currently not an option.
you will probably have to meet with FaceBook and work out a contractual deal for greater access to their data. I would bet that the answer will be no, no and no, seeing as it appears you are trying to monetize their data, and furthermore, do so without the explicit permission of the users, but hey give it a shot.
I have a similar task - By default FB return only last ~50 posts or all in last 30 days(whichever is smaller) in FQL you should use created_time filter to receive more results. my current problem is that via FQL I receive no more than ~500 posts from any FB page wall even when LIMIT increased:
'select post_id from stream where source_id = 40796308305 and created_time <'.time().' LIMIT 1000000 ;'
this FQL request to CocaCola FB Page returns now ~300 posts only (less than 2 day posts).
If you find a better solution pls advise :)
I want to get a list of all users (even if they are my friends or not) who are using my facebook application. Is this possible? If so, how?
And another quick question if we're still here :) Assue I have a facebook id of a person, can I retrieve his name by using it?
I don't believe that you can get a list of all the Facebook IDs of users of a particular application. There doesn't appear to be a possible query for this based on an examination of the FQL tables, probably due to performance and privacy reasons. Generally the presumption is that you maintain a local list of users in your own application, and correlate them to Facebook via their ID, so you would already have all these IDs.
To answer your second question though, yes, that is definitely possible. The Facebook API provides both the users.getStandardInfo and the users.getInfo methods, both of which take user Ids and return information about the user, including the name. users.getInfo can even be used without a session key to just get the name of the user.