I will try to be as clear as I can with my request but as I am still unsure as to what I am looking for I might come across as vague.
I was hoping I could get some help understanding the best approach to allowing a user to post a link with an attached image to the walls of a selection of their friends on Facebook. There are lot of approaches and answers out there but I am having trouble determining what is best.
Thanks for helping me see straight
Mark
Its really up to the user if your using the JS toolkit.
Click share under your question. Then when dialog pops up you get the option of where to share it.
So solution 1) leave it in the hands of the user.
If you want to force them into share on friends wall you will need to find something that does this or
DIY.
The DIY approach would be to have your site /app do oAuth authentication. Pass that to an oauth library and then list a users friends maybe with https://github.com/mbrevoort/jquery-facebook-multi-friend-selector.
Then issue the appropriate graph request to post to each one's time line.
The choice is yours but those are the 2 approaches I know of.
I need to search the list of people on Facebook using the API. I know Facebook has this function but it is on the web platform. I want to take this advantage into my application so I think the API is the only way I can do it.
I also know another application can do the similar thing is the Twigmore (http://twigmore.com). They can search people by location (within its own application). Does anyone know how does they manage this?
Any advice is highly appreciated,
Thanks,
Leo
You specify location and work in the friends API call with friends_location and friends_work_history permissions
graph.faceobok.com/me/friends?fields=location,work
I'm pretty new to Facebook development and am trying to wrap my head around the what you do and don't have access to. I've done some searching through the forums and the googles but haven't found much on getting historical data.
I would like to access two things from an 'authenticated' user:
1) Is a history of relationship status' of their immediate friends. - It doesn't look like Facebook gives out past information, but thought I would put it out there.
2) Once you have user authenticated are you able to access their friends likes/dislikes, interests?
Thanks for all the help in advance its much appreciated!
Jason
Facebook friend history is not available. Only current list of friends is, and there is no date available as to when they became freinds. You can get a lot of information about friends by asking for extended permissions such as friends_likes, friends_interests, etc.
I'm trying to grab someones facebook picture from their page while just knowing their email address. I know that the service gravatar.com does this, but a lot of people don't have accounts there so I would like to grab the pictures from facebook. Is this possible? I didn't find anything about this in the developers part of facebook.
Programatically? You may not necessarily have the right to use others photographs. Facebook can because the users have agreed to their T&Cs and uploaded the pictures but I don't think you have any rights concerning the pictures without first contacting the owner.
just a quick look at facebook and i've found that when you are logged in to facebook you can search for users based on email address and that will bring back the avatar. i'd be surprised if neither the api nor the FQL supports this functionality since it seems pretty basic.
+1 evernoob on the legality part. altho it is available to you when you're logged in so i can't see why they'd specifically restrict you.
good luck and let us know the results.
N
I'm a graduate student whose research is complex network. I am working on a project that involves analyzing connections between Facebook users. Is it possible to write a crawler for Facebook based on friendship information?
I looked around but couldn't find any things useful so far. It seems Facebook isn't fond of such activity. Can I rely on the Facebook API?
Update (Jan-08-2010): Thank you very much for the responses. I guess I probably need to contact Facebook directly then. Cheers
Update (Feb-16-2011): A new book, "Mining the social web", just came out. In it, there is a chapter devoted entirely for mining Facebook using Python. Cheers.
You can't rely on the Facebook API unfortunately. To get friend information, you need to use something like friends.get(). However, any Facebook API method that returns user information like this requires that you have an active session key from that user, and generally the way you get an active session key is to have the user come to your Facebook application or page.
In summary, the information you are talking about is essentially private. You can't pick a person from Facebook, get their friends, and get those friend's friends, and so on. To me this is a good thing for privacy, but of course it prevents arbitrary analysis.
I'd throw out the idea of writing a quick and dirty application with some user appeal that you could use for research. If a group like S**t My Dad Says (funny, not really safe for work) can get 120,000 users in a couple of months, you could probably plead your case with a small research application and get a reasonable amount of users.
The problem is that facebook friendship information is typically private and only accessible to friends. It should be a lot easier to build this network on Twitter, if this is an option for you.
As others have stated, this is typically private information. If, however, Facebook per se isn't a requirement, you could use Google's Social API. A snippet from the Google Social Graph API page: "With the Social Graph API, developers can now utilize public connections their users have already created in other web services. It makes information about public connections between people easily available and useful."
Here's an article on using it in Ruby:
http://articles.sitepoint.com/article/google-social-graph-api-ruby-rails#
This lifecode post provide a basic python script to scrape your facebook friends contact info.
The output of this script, is the profile ID, profile pame, profile URL, e-mail address and mobile/phone number (if provided by friend).
WARNING: This is against Facebook TOS. Use at your own risk.
Info provided for educational and research purposes
http://ruel.me/blog/2010/11/26/scrape-your-facebook-friends-contact-info-with-python/
You can use http://www.facebook.com/directory/ to get the public listed people.