I am looking for a way to connect to facebook by allowing the user to enter in their username and password and have our app connect to their account and get their contacts so that they can invite them to join their group on our site. I have written a facebook app before, but this is not an app as much as it is a connector so that they can invite all their friends or just some to the site we are working on.
I have seen several other sites do this and also connect to Yahoo, Gmail and Hotmail contacts. I dont think they are using Facebook Connect to do this since it is so new, but they may be.
Any solution in any language is fine as I can port whatever example to use C#. I cannot find anything specifically on Google or Facebook to address this specific problem. Any help is appreciated.
I saw a first answer get removed that had suggested i might need to scrape the friends page. The more I look around, this might be what i need to do. Any other way i think will require the person to add it as an app. I am wondering how a answer can get removed, maybe that user deleted it.
Try This
Not sure if its possible explicitly but there are indirect ways to do it!!!
Here is another article that seems to cover what you want to do http://facebook-developer.net/2008/02/20/allow-your-users-to-invite-their-friends/
Related
I don't use either FaceBook or Twitter, so I am somewhat hampered here.
A friend is going on a once in a life-tine yacht journey and their will be a satellite modem which reports latitude/longitude (and some more data) data on a regular basis. This data gets stored in a database, to which I will have access.
My friend wants to Face/Tweet updates, hopefully with a Google Maps map. He doesn't want to give me his passwords as that would give me full access and let me read his private stuff.
I quite understand that, but what are my options? Obviously, the APIs to FaceTweet won't allow me to post without (his) credentials. Can I create accounts of my own and he can then configure his FaceTweet to say "anything that gets posted there, I want to post it on my site too"? Does Face/Tweet offer such a facility?
The alternative seems to be to code a desktop app to scan the database regularly and post new updates using his password which he must enter into the app, so the app must run on his home PC.
Of course, that is not perfect; if his home PC crashes when he is away then the updates will cease. If it runs on my server, then no problem, but he doesn't want to give me his password and lives too far away to come here and type it in himself.
Can anyone advise me as to how best to implement this? Thanks in advance.
For Facebook you will have to create an application with "Post on your behalf" permission.
Update:
For Twitter it's much trickier: you will have to deal with OAuth tokens to access someone's account after you ask user to authenticate. Here is a fine article on that. You will have to press some free PDF download on our members page and it will ask for you e-mail, but you can press cancel and it redirects you to article anyway.
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.
Can I connect to 2 different websites at the same time using fb connect?
I have a networking site that uses FB connect but I also have a forum that I would like my users to register on is there any way that when they sign up to one site they automatically create the same user details on the other site using the connect button?
Or is there another way around it so that I can have them join both sites at the same time so they dont create 2 different users?
Any help would be great but please put it in simple terms as Im not very experienced at things like this :)
Your best bet would be to create your forum as a subdomain of your main site, so https://forum.yoursite.com. If you do this, even if the two are hosted/run separately, you can use the same FB login.
Otherwise if they're not the same site then really users shouldn't be signing up for both at the same time.
I'm a little bit lost.
So, I'm not really trying to integrate facebook with my webproject, but in some point I need to get some information of a fb account... like friend's email, name, status and some other things...
From what I read so far, it seems that it's no longer possible to get friends' email and some other information without the friends authorize you app to do that, at least when using the last api from fb (graph api)... so I thought that was something impossible to do, until I see some sites (like yahoo) offering a possibility to import your contacts from your fb account without his friends authorize. Does anyone know how they do that?
I tried using other apis, like facebook-java-api, restFB, and others but in all cases I'm getting some kind of error... so if someone could at least give me a direction or something like that... have you done this? or know how to? using which api?
some info: I'm developing in Java with Eclipse, using tomcat as my web server.
well it's a little bit confusing since its not a technical issue, but if someone could help me pointing some direction I could tell each error i got when trying to go this direction or something like that.
You dont HAVE to use an SDK at all... Basically the only URL you need to be aware of is graph.facebook.com and you can just make HTTP requests to that URL. You might want to look into the facebook connect feature too.
I am looking for a way to connect to Facebook by allowing the user to enter in their username and password and have our app connect to their account and get their contacts so that they can invite them to join their group on our site. I have written a Facebook app before, but this is not an app as much as it is a connector so that they can invite all their friends or just some to the site we are working on.
I have seen several other sites do this and also connect to Yahoo, Gmail and Hotmail contacts. I don't think they are using Facebook Connect to do this since it is so new, but they may be.
Any solution in any language is fine as I can port whatever example to use C#. I cannot find anything specifically on Google or Facebook to address this specific problem. Any help is appreciated.
I saw a first answer get removed that had suggested I might need to scrape the friends page. The more I look around, this might be what I need to do. Any other way I think will require the person to add it as an app. I am wondering how a answer can get removed, maybe that user deleted it.
Not answering the question but hopefully providing some insight...
It's features like this that teach people that it is ok to enter their username and password for site A on a form from site B. This is most definitely not ok. Please do not make people think it is.
But maybe the Facebook API allows you to circumvent this problem, by making people log into Facebook itself to give your app access. A slight but important difference.
You can use Facebook Connect 'Account Linking'.
Python/Django example from Facebook developers wiki:
Page:
def invite_friends(request):
#HTML escape function for invitation content.
from cgi import escape
facebook_uid = request.facebook.uid
# Convert the array of friends into a comma-delimeted string.
exclude_ids = ",".join([str(a) for a in request.facebook.friends.getAppUsers()])
# Prepare the invitation text that all invited users will receive.
content = """<fb:name uid="%s" firstnameonly="true" shownetwork="false"/> wants to invite you to play Online board games, <fb:req-choice url="%s" label="Put Online Gaming and Video Chat on your profile!"/>""" % (facebook_uid, request.facebook.get_add_url())
invitation_content = escape(content, True)
return render_to_response('facebook/invite_friends.fbml',
{'content': invitation_content, 'exclude_ids': exclude_ids })
Template:
<fb:request-form action="http://apps.facebook.com/livevideochat/?skipped=1"
method="POST" invite="true" type="Online Games"
content="{{ content }}">
<fb:multi-friend-selector max="20"
actiontext="Here are your friends who aren't using Online Games and Live Video Chat. Invite them to play Games Online today!"
showborder="true" rows="5" exclude_ids="{{ exclude_ids }}"> </fb:request-form>
I asked this question awhile ago and before facebook connect was live and well. The best way to really do this is using facebook connect.
http://developers.facebook.com/connect.php?tab=website
I am currently using this on our live site and using the Facebook Developer Toolkit for .NET on Codeplex here:
http://www.codeplex.com/FacebookToolkit
Good luck!
I looked up that it is alright to answer my own post, so here it is.
It turns out that you will have to scrape the friends list which is not legal in facebook terms of use. So we will not be doing this for our sites. Here are a few articles that show what happens when you don't play by the rules. Plaxo tested their scraping with Scoble and Facebook shut down Scobles account in January of this year.
http://scobleizer.com/2008/01/03/what-i-was-using-to-hit-facebook/
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-9839474-36.html
Seems like Facebook has an api for this. Check this blog here.
http://developers.facebook.com/news.php?blog=1&story=73
Here is an open source PHP 5 tool to let you import contacts from both e-mail and some social networks including Facebook: OpenInviter is an open source PHP class, written in PHP5, for importing contacts from most of the well-known e-mail providers & social networks.
Just import them into Yahoo using FB Connect. All better? No screen scraping, no FB violations. Done.