Is it possible to access Facebook APIs for logging in a user, or to allow a user to become a fan of a fan page through a third party site, without actually creating an app on facebook?
Why don't you create a fab page directly for users to become fans for that page? And as far as i know, you can not access facebook API without API key.
You can't access the API without creating an application and getting an API key. There are a small number of API queries that will work without the user having added an application or even interacted with it but they generally on retrieve very basic data.
There's certainly no programmable way of making a user a fan of a page without using a fan box widget or having them do it directly through the site. This is because the post_form_id value which Facebook uses for these kinds of interactions is only present on pages served from facebook.com and is never accessible to the developer. To allow otherwise would open up the system to all kinds of exploitation.
I've no idea what problem you're trying to solve anyway. Creating an application API key is no hardship (and it doesn't have to be an active application for session-less queries - just create an app and grab the keys) and the fan box widget can be styled with CSS, as long as you follow the basic rules that Facebook has set out.
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I want to build a dashboard that enables any company to track the social media activity of its competitors.
For example.. let's say you are a small business owner. You would be able to add the 'facebook/instagram page id's' of your 4-5 competitors within the app. The app would retrieve the historical data of your competitors.. and enable you to interactively explore what they are doing. How often they are posting, at the time of the day, what is liked/not liked, etc.
Problem is: Since Cambridge Analytica, Facebook requires app review to allow access to public page data. But how do I show the app.. when I don't have the data to build it?
Does anyone have any remote idea whether the thing that I am trying to build is generally within that would be considered permissible by Facebook?
You can still make your dashboard which will show your Facebook activity.
To get the Facebook page ID of 4-5 competitors. The competitors have to use your app and allow permission to your app for accessing public features.
You have to own a Facebook page. Get OAuth key. For every request to Facebook you will be using this Key. In case of mischievous activity your OAuth key will be blocked.
What you are trying to do is not possible these days and neither permissible by Facebook.
You can build your App already and just use your own Pages for testing - with a Page Token of those Pages. Send Facebook a video how you are using the data in the review process. I have recently got Page Public Content Access approved for that specific use case. Facebook just wants to see how you will use the public content, the App does not need to be 100% finished.
What´s allowed and what´s not allowed: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/apps/review/feature#reference-PAGES_ACCESS
So here's my use case:
A user sees a cool product on a shopping website (sample-shopping-site.com)
They want to share this product with their friends on facebook
They however want to pass the information to an intermediary site (a-sharing-app.com - that i'm trying to develop), that posts to facebook on my behalf.
My questions:
Is this even allowed by facebook? i.e. can a-sharing-app.com put a widget on sample-shopping-site.com, so that a person visiting sample-shopping-site.com can share on facebook via a-sharing-app.com?
If yes, could you point me to helpful bits on the facebook developers API page?
Just want to clarify: the APIs and most questions/examples on the internet point towards sharing directly from sample-shopping-site.com to facebook, by registering sample-shopping-site.com as an App with facebook.
I however want to register a-sharing-app.com as an App, and then putting a widget of a-sharing-app.com on any page (such as sample-shopping-site.com) allows me to share on facebook by passing information to a-sharing-app.com
As far as I know there is no Facebook guidelines that restrict what you want to achieve, so I may safely say that yes, you can create an app so that a person visiting sample-shopping-site.com can share on facebook via a-sharing-app.com . I can even mention a well know service that is doing the same, Disqus.
How you can implement this feature is a little up to you but may I suggest what Disqus or apps like it are doing is, they use the JavaScript API of Facebook to integrate and are mostly enabled within an iframe that loads content from their domain. The exchange of information between sample-shopping-site.com and a-sharing-app.com is done by the JavaScript loader which loads the necessary iframe then. The other things you would like to check would be Dialogs which you may use for different cases, or you may do it on your own using the FB.api and make API calls to the Graph API for sharing data.
I'm planning on launching a website and an accompanying facebook page. Although each of these 'sites' will have their own goal, I'd like to have a 2-way sync set-up for part of the user generated content on my site, such that:
Content published on my site (by editors, or users) that satisfies some criteria are pushed to the wall of the accompanying facebook page
The other way around: content published on the facebook page wall by users, is pushed to my website. (I want to be in complete control of how to format, display, annotate that content, so I'm not looking for some ready-made widgets)
For 2. I'm pretty sure I can poll for a newsfeed or channel of the specific facebook page at regular intervals, but I'm wondering if a tighter integration is possible, i.e: pushing the changed content(delta's, river whatever you want to call it) to a dedicated rest-endpoint from which my website can consume the contents or something.
For 1. I need an automated way to post to the wall of the facebook page I own. Preferrably with the user-credentials (if okayed by the user) if that user was logged-in on my site through Facebook, or otherwise with some fallback credential, e.g: my own facebook credentials.
Just looking for some pointers where to start looking in the vast Developer Facebook resources, or, better yet, some libraries (prefferably Node.js, but others are okay to look at architecture) that take care of some of the plumbing
1) You can post on page with different ways
as a user : You need user access token and he should be a fan of the page or If your fan page allows wall posts from any user in its settings.
as a page : You need page access token
You can get page access token and extend it for long time and store it in DB. You can use it 60 days.
FYI:
Extended access token
Tutorial
2) Using graph API you can pull at regular intervals. There is a real time notification system also but it very limited for pages (its not useful for your case).
FYI: Real Time Updates
I'm trying to get a user to 'Like' a page via the SDK. User is signed in and I get a valid access tokken form the cookie. My APP has asked for permissions read_stream and publish_stream. I can successfully do things like post to their wall, etc. But when my APP tries to 'Like' a page, I get the error back:
OAuthException: (#3) Application does not have the capability to make this API call.
Am I missing some other permission, or is there a setting I have to turn on in my APP? I'm at a loss here.
You can't like a Page on behalf of a user (Bugzilla discussion). You can, however, like posts, comments, and photos on behalf of a user.
Edit 7/9/2012
Since bugzilla no long exists, the bug linked above is inaccessible. Google doesn't have a cached version of the page, so I ran another search. The best thing I could come up with was this Google Code Discussion regarding the ActionScript API.
Facebook makes brief mention of Publishing likes via the Graph API in the documentation, but doesn't say one way or another whether you can like a Page on behalf of a user - just "Objects" which (probably arguably) are not "objects" in Facebook-lingo.
My thought is, the API to like page is available, but is only offered to white listed applications (such as, the Facebook iOS and Android applications) written by "special" publishers. There's obvious reasons why Facebook wouldn't want/allow developers to create like connections on the graph. It would be taken advantage of by spammers and other nefarious developers and would deteriorate the meaning of what a "like" represents for a page on Facebook.
My guess is, you'd have to make a pretty strong case to Facebook about why you need/want access to the Page's Like connection (for publishing) before they'd even consider giving you access. I'd also guess that they'd want to verify that you're doing only user initiated like creations (in such a way that the iOS application would handle it) so as to protect the reptutation/meaning of a "like" action.
Actually this is NOT true, but you have to do a complicated Javascript / UIWebView process in order to display a Facebook 'page' of JUST the like button on your view, and this like button you can configure in the JavaScript / Objective-C (using string replacement) to be any Facebook page url you like.
Facebook's platform policies don't allow for a web-based like button aside from using the officially supported options
Those options doesn't require using OAuth or the Open Graph api. However, facebook just added support for mobile apps to send like actions through opengraph.
I'm not sure if they intend to allow sites to customize their like buttons or just apps...
Liking works for me with the iOS SDK using the graph api:
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/actions/builtin/likes/
Let's say I own/control a Facebook page where events are posted. I'd like to display these events on another website (In my case, a WordPress blog, but that's not the important part) on an "Upcoming events" page.
What I'm unsure about is: Is the Facebook API usable "externally" like this? I've downloaded the PHP library and have a demo app running that works from within Facebook (i.e. emitting FBML that facebook.com interprets and displays to the logged-in user), but in my case I want a third party (my web server) to query Facebook every so often, rather than the site visitors directly requesting data (HTML/JSON/etc.) from Facebook itself.
Is this sort of thing possible with the Facebook API? How will my web server authenticate itself? What information do I have to store?
Note: I'm looking for information more at a "sequence diagram" conceptual level, not just asking for code. That part I can figure out myself. ;) Unfortunately, Google and the FB developer wiki have not been entirely forthcoming. What do I need to know so I can start coding?
This is a basic overview of how I've done it for a few of my clients who wanted similar functionality:
Create a pretty basic app that prompts for Extended permissions, specifically "offline_access" and whatever else you need
Store the resulting Session Key in your database with the UID
Create a secure, authenticated webservice for your app which allows you to get the info you need for a UID that you supply, using the session that you've stored in your database
On the website make requests to your app's webservice, being sure to cache the results for a certain period of time and only make a new request to your webservice once the cache has expired (I use 5-10 minutes for most of mine)
So basically your Facebook app acts sort of like a proxy between the website and the user, doing all of the authenticating and requesting using legitimate means.
I've used a webservice because I only wanted to maintain one Facebook app for multiple client's needs. It works like this (in a not-very-awesome ASCII art diagram):
Facebook User 1 \ / Client Website 1
Facebook User 2 --- Facebook App --- Client Website 2
Facebook User 3 / \ Client Website 3
Note: I've only done this for users, not pages, so your mileage may vary.
You can do Events.get with the Facebook API then supply the page/profile ID you'd like to get the events for. Depending on how your page is setup you may have to authenticate, simply use your Facebook account, since you should have access to all the events. oh and make sure you do plenty of caching so your not hitting Facebook on every page load.
AFAIK other than user info, you can't fetch any other data from facebook.
But you can try it other way - say create an app that stores events and other relevant information on a webserver and then your other website can easily access that info.