Facebook Graph API - Finding a users top friends - facebook

Question

I am writing a android app that will pull in a list of all the users friends so they can tag them in the photo but displaying a large box of the friends with their photo instead of a list. Because some people have 500+ friends, we all know their are only a handful (maybe 50) that are friends they actively communicate on Facebook by comments or being tagged in photos. I would like to be able to just pull their top xxx friends as it seems Facebook does this same thing on their site, but I just cant find anything in the Graph API to do this task.
Anyone have any pointers?

Answer 1

The other way of doing it is, make a Graph API request for the status messages posted by the user, the friends who have commented or liked his status are the ones with whom he/she interacts the most, doing this is pretty simple, you can use this:
$statuses = $facebook->api('/me/statuses');
foreach($statuses['data'] as $status){
// processing likes array for calculating fanbase.
foreach($status['likes']['data'] as $likesData){
$frid = $likesData['id'];
$frname = $likesData['name'];
$friendArray[$frid] = $frname;
}
foreach($status['comments']['data'] as $comArray){
// processing comments array for calculating fanbase
$frid = $comArray['from']['id'];
$frname = $comArray['from']['name'];
}
}
keep counters as per your choice, and it will be done.

Answer 2

I wanted to do this without requiring additional/extended permissions. I found a fairly decent approximation for my needs was the mutual_friend_count field in the user FQL table.
So I used:
$params = array('method' => 'fql.query',
'query' => 'SELECT uid, pic_square, name
FROM user
WHERE uid IN (SELECT uid2 FROM friend WHERE uid1 = me())
ORDER BY mutual_friend_count DESC
And then just fire that off using the PHP SDK
$friend_array = $facebook->api($params);

Answer 3

I've ran into this same issue in a web app I'm working on, and open-sourced the code I've used, albeit in Ruby:
https://github.com/mikejarema/facebook-friend-rank
This is actually a web service which takes an active access token & user id and (assuming a read_stream permission has been granted) returns a hash of ids to counts which can be used for sorting within your android app.
I suppose since you're running on a smartphone, this let's you offload a series of calls and any call latency to a server somewhere which is running code optimized specifically for the friend ranking task.
In particular, the ranking algorithm looks at a user's 500 most recent interactions (activity feed) and tallies up the frequency of all friends appearing there. The result gives a reasonable ordering of friends, best to worst, and it also works on subsets of friends (eg. sorting mutual friends).
There's lots of room for exploring photo tags, mutual friend counts, and also looking for the type of interactions (eg. a checkin with a friend is probably a better measure of closeness than a like on their status). The project may evolve to encompass some of these considerations.
Here's a sample app using this approach and Friend Rank on the backend, inspect the network calls to see what the API looks like:
http://facebook-friend-rank.herokuapp.com/demo/index.html

Answer 4

If you watch the network traffic from Facebook's iPhone app, you can see they make this FQL call to get the users top 10 friends they communicate most with:
SELECT uid2, communication_rank
FROM friend where uid1 = me()
ORDER BY communication_rank DESC LIMIT 10
Unfortunately this is not available to applications by default. You would need to contact a Facebook engineer to get this field enabled for your application.

Answer 5

I recommend you the following class:
https://github.com/gajus/facebook-friend-rank
It give your friends a score based on user interaction:
'feed_like'
'feed_comment'
'feed_addressed'
'photo_tagged_friend_by_user'
'photo_tagged_user_by_friend'
'photo_like'
'photo_comment'
'friend_mutual'
'inbox_in_conversation'
'inbox_chat'
then it sort the list by score desc.
Hope it helps.

Answer 6

I can think of two direct ways to get a user's "top friends." The first does not require any extended permissions, rather just a valid access token (which as an app owner, you'll have). You make an API call to get the user's feed, which is a connection to the user node.
This call will that user's 25 most recent posts. With any luck, at least some of the items in JSON array returned from this call will be posts from that user's friends. How will know? Well each post comprising the feed, will have an unique id associated with it--whether an Application or FB User is the source of the Post--and each one of those FB ids can be compared against the user's friend list.
The idea of course is that any friends whose posts appear in the last 25 posts of the user's feed, are closer friends than otherwise.
The second technique is to make a call to the Graph API requesting the friendslists connection to the user node. This call requires the *read_friendlists* permission. The name a user gives to a given list is often strongly probative of the importance of the friends comprising that list (e.g., *best_friends*, or whatever); in other words, one or a combination of a couple of those lists will likely give you that user's top friends.