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
Related
I plan to start a Facebook contest where the user is first asked to like the page, then they submit their email to enter the contest.
I checked out other contest examples on:
http://contests.about.com/od/facebookcontests/tp/Facebook-Contests-and-Facebook-Sweepstakes.htm
Most Facebook pages direct a user to a "Like this page to continue" page. I tried to google around to find how this is done, but I cannot find anything. I tried to find ways to track specific user's likes,
For contest-specific legal reasons, I cannot use an app that makes the contest and keeps track of the entries. So I will need to create this from scratch.
I have made other apps before, and I do have access to an external server where I plan to create a page and link to it from facebook for the 'frame' type app.
Is there a standard way of doing this? Is there a documentation that I have yet to find?
Thanks
(Me answering my own question)
Some more googling I was able to find:
How to check if current facebook user like a page using PHP SDK?
A php version of the same question.
In that case, I will be able to check out FQL's documentation to find out how to get this information.
I really don't want a permission popup from facebook to pop up, and I don't think I will need that to make this work. I will try that and add a comment to this answer if it works just like what I'm looking for.
I run a social membership club and my website users can log into my site with each having their own profile page.
On each of my user's profile pages, I want to display a list of photos which have been tagged with that user on Facebook. I know this part is possible.
The bit I am struggling with is giving each of my users the ability to 'untag' themselves in each photo of them that is displayed in the list. The 'untagging' should happen directly from my site. Is this possible and how could I go about doing this?
Hope someone can help/has ideas?
Unfortunately, there's no facbeook API that allows removal of photo tags at this time of writing.
Its not documented and I haven't tested this but I'd chance issuing a DELTE request to
/PHOTO_ID/tags/USER_ID
Worth a shot through the graph explorer anyway.
I'm linking my app to Facebook, and would like people to log in with their Facebook account, but I can't figure out how to do this. I had read up on Facebook Connect, but it seems that that's not used any more - but every tutorial I can find seems to refer to it. When I try to follow them, it doesn't work, because the interface has changed.
So, can anyone direct me to a tutorial or guide to doing this the new way?
Basically, what I want to do is this:
A user who is signed into Facebook and comes to my webpage is automatically logged in to my app (with the usual Facebook 'granting permission' windows etc), or can sign in with their Facebook account if they're not already logged in.
I then want to use Facebook to link users with their friends who are also registered on my site, so they can share things.
I would also like to have access to Facebook comments made on wall posts from my site - so the comment stream for a particular post can be seen on my site as well as on Facebook, and comments can be made on either.
If anyone can point me in the right direction (or even tell me what I should be typing in to Google!) I'd be very grateful.
Thanks.
Some sample apps that do many of the things you speak of are shown here. The Graph API is probably your best bet right now for delivering the content and access you need and there are numerous tutorials online for how to use it, including the Facebook Developers site itself.
You will find good Tuts on ThinkDiff, e.g.
http://thinkdiff.net/facebook/new-javascript-sdk-oauth-2-0-based-fbconnect-tutorial/
http://thinkdiff.net/facebook/php-sdk-3-0-graph-api-base-facebook-connect-tutorial/
http://thinkdiff.net/facebook/graph-api-iframe-base-facebook-application-development-php-sdk-3-0/
I know this is an older question, but the current method for authentication is OAuth 2.0.
Facebook provides a pretty good outline of what steps are necessary in this Reference:
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/authentication/client-side/
This example allows the authentication to occur entirely in Javascript on the client side so that you can request a potential user to authenticate via Facebook and then confirm access to your application.
If the user is already logged in, only the access confirmation for your application is performed.
If the user is already logged in and access has already been granted, the user is not required to login, or reconfirm access.
I've done a little searching and was wondering if there is a way to link a users account in our web app with their social media accounts they choose to link (facebook, twitter, etc). i.e. when they log into our web app they are auto logged into facebook, twitter, etc?
I see facebook has an api to login to our web app using their facebook book account but I want it to work the other way around, I want them logged into facebook when they log into their account via our web app.
Thanks,
Ryan
It is definitely possible-from your question I assume you would like to pull data and make actions on behalf of a user? If so, you will need the offline_access permission as well as all the other permissions you will need (check out the list here to see exactly which ones you require). Then, you can trigger a script on your server that tell facebook as soon as the user is logged in to your site, to log in your application as the user as well.
NOTE: You might be going about this in the wrong way. I would advise that you specify a bit more details on what exactly you need the user to be logged in for, and I can (probably) provide you with a decent answer.
EDIT: In response to your question in the comment, Ryan, here is my answer:
You need to divide this problem into 2 different situations-one: your company wants you to write all the code from scratch and don't use what facebook has to offer, in which case you should create a custom login script that enables your users to use their facebook account as the Actual user account in your web app. This is the best solution in my opinion, and is supported by the ever-so-awesome Jeff Atwood. Here's a link to how to do just this, and a tutorial about this also.
Or your company is comfortable with using Facebook's Social Plugins.
Then you should focus on Like Button & Comments : These social plugins are the best way to enable people to create social experiences if they're already logged in.
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.