Why I got so many posts without any content from Graph API? - facebook

Question

I am developing a social media monitoring service. And I'm now trying to fetch the posts and comments from a certain group of users.
However, I found that a lot of empty posts are fetched by Graph API https://graph.facebook.com/somebodysuid/posts?access_token=xxxx . That is, a lot of posts are of the following form:
`{
"id": "somebodysuid_xxxxxxxxxxxx",
"from": {
"name": "XXX YYY AAA",
"id": "somebodysuid"
},
"type": "status",
"created_time": "2011-08-03T05:49:11+0000",
"updated_time": "2011-08-03T05:49:11+0000",
"comments": {
"count": 0
}
},
{
"id": "somebodysuid_yyyyyyyyyyyyyyy",
"from": {
"name": "XXX YYY AAA",
"id": "somebodysuid"
},
"type": "status",
"created_time": "2011-07-24T23:31:35+0000",
"updated_time": "2011-07-24T23:31:35+0000",
"comments": {
"count": 0
}
},
Through these are indeed posts, but they're totally useless. The worst thing is, half of the data I fetched are of this kind....
Can somebody please explain why so many empty posts would the API fetch? Can this be solve by any way?

Answer 1

Those posts are probably updates made through the "new share form" where users can tag places and friends and attach geo-locations without adding any additional message.
Those type of posts are typed as "status" but graph api does not return the other meta-datas yet (location, tags, etc...) that's why you see them empty.
Let's hope FB will fix that quickly :(

Answer 2

I think FB has started to add activity information that appears on a Facebook web page, such as "John Doe is now friends with Tom Jones", or "Fred Smith and 2 others have changed their profile image". This activity information is a) incomplete in the returned feed and b) does odd things when you look for more information by asking the graph API for detail based on the posts id field.
My current guess is that this is new functionality for the feed - I have been unable to find documentation or mention of it. They are very difficult to process at this time, since they look like other things and contain no identifying detail.
Here is the question I posted looking for help. It give another example:
Facebook graph "user/home" feed now contains activities as post items that are difficult to identify