I have an iPhone app idea that will include viewing your news feed( stream ) in an iPhone app. There is a lot more to it than that, but I'm wondering why I can't find any apps on the app store that lets you view your stream in some way. Does anyone know why?
Does facebook frown on this? There is a API method stream.get that lets you do this but it's in beta. Is it a bad idea to use the beta methods in an app?
I'm just suprised that there is so many different twitter clients but there is just on facebook client and why hasn't created streams in an iPhone app besides the main facebook app?
I have implemented what you are talking about and my app is in the App Store, albeit only in a couple European stores currently. It was, however, reviewed and approved in the US App Store. I can't send a link for it currently as we are not yet announcing it in the US (until December), however, I assure you it can be done and is not too hard to implement.
I don't think Facebook frowns upon this so much as I think their API just hasn't matured enough yet. It's getting there, though. I think mostly what you see (or don't see in the App Store) is from a lack of vision for how to use Facebook for applications. The official Facebook app provides what users need but ideas like yours are going to grow as more and more people (developers/entrepreneurs) realize that Facebook is not just a social network, but an entire social networking platform they can leverage in a powerful way... Ok. I've said too much. Cool stuff is coming in December, though. ;-)
If you don't want to use the beta features, you can go for FQL to get what you want. Here is the code I used to implement pulling the last 20 friend status updates:
NSString* fql = [NSString stringWithFormat:
#"SELECT uid, pic_square, name, status FROM user WHERE uid IN (SELECT uid2 FROM friend WHERE uid1 = %lld) AND status.time > 0 ORDER BY status.time DESC LIMIT 20", fbSession.uid];
NSDictionary* params = [NSDictionary dictionaryWithObject:fql forKey:#"query"];
last20FriendsStatusRequest = [FBRequest requestWithDelegate:self];
[last20FriendsStatusRequest call:#"facebook.fql.query" params:params];
And then the delegate callback looks like this:
- (void)request:(FBRequest*)request didLoad:(id)result
{
if (request == last20FriendsStatusRequest)
{
// Callback to my delegate here. result is an NSArray*
// of NSDictionaries* containing key-value pairs for the
// fields you requested in the query, e.g. uid, pic_square,
// name, and status. pic_square is the URL of the user's
// profile picture icon.
}
}
Let me know if you need any more info.
I guess people haven't found a use for it. Other developers may be afraid of the beta tag (yes Facebook, unlike Google, treats it as a beta tag -- it's subject to change and may break your app). It's up to your judgement if you think it's "safe" enough. We're currently developing a commercial iPhone application that uses stream.get.
On the desktop there are multiple apps that user Stream.get(), which could as well be done on iPhone
Related
I want to get all wall updates of user's google plus account like facebook.
I have seen official link for it which is
Google Plus Documentation for iOS
& I have downloaded sample from there which is here Google Plus SDK Sample
it works well for getting user's information like email id,profile name,user's friend list with images & for posting on google plus.
but I am not getting user's post & updates.
all I want is user's wall updates & user's friends updates from google plus like facebook does.
but from above link i have found nothing for getting wall updates.
I have searched google for this also & get nothing regarding above problem.
any help for above problem appreciated.
Thanks in advance
From a backend server you can easily perform this API call to read a user's public activities. You can see the REST API here:
https://developers.google.com/apis-explorer/#p/plus/v1/plus.activities.list
Combine this with a people.list and you can query for a user's friend activities on Google+.
On iOS, you probably don't want to make these API calls directly from a user's device. If you can, you should offload the work to a backend server to avoid overworking the mobile client. That said, you can perform an API query similar to listing people in circles:
GTLQueryPlus *query =
[GTLQueryPlus queryForActivitiesListWithUserId:#"me" collection:#"public"];
[[[GPPSignIn sharedInstance] plusService] executeQuery:query
completionHandler:^(GTLServiceTicket *ticket,
GTLPlusActivityFeed *actFeed,
NSError *error) {
}
If you put a breakpoint in the application on the function, the activities feed will be something like as follows:
(lldb) po actFeed
{
nextPageToken:"CAIQ44qZ58DgtwIgFCgB"
etag:""DOKFJGXi7L9ogpHc3dzouWOBEEg/UMVQXfw8ynZaTz31tpuZo473TsQ""
title:"Google+ List of Activities for Collection PUBLIC"
updated:"2013-07-16T04:04:34.697Z"
kind:"plus#activityFeed" items:[20]
}
The items array contains the actual activities that a user has publicly written on Google+.
I have been searching for tutorials on google for posting some text on google plus. But it seems like there are none.
I have also tried to go through the docs provided by google for developers of mac and iPhone but can't find anything that will solve my problem. Also there are little information on how to get the user login to there google plus account.
I am not sure what to do for the user login, do I have to use some GTLObject or use UIWebView like foursquare for user login.
Here is a list of docs that I had went through.
http://code.google.com/p/google-api-objectivec-client/wiki/Introduction
http://code.google.com/p/google-api-objectivec-client/wiki/BuildingTheLibrary
http://code.google.com/p/gtm-oauth2/
As it turns out there are only a limited number of api's available for google + developers and that also only as GET calls according to the developer of google + page my question will not get any definite answers as google is in the process of creating new api's for accessing user information on google plus.
https://developers.google.com/+/api/
Also you can use the google client sdk provided by google but it is much easier to show a webview for user login. I managed to get the people list from google plus.
The steps are same as for getting the access token as in foursquare. Just with some small changes.
in viewdidload method.
NSString *authStr = #"https://accounts.google.com/o/oauth2/auth?client_id=client_id&redirect_uri=http://somevalidurl.com&scope=https://www.googleapis.com/auth/plus.me&response_type=token";
as a url for loading request in webview. People should note one thing here that you need to create a client id in api console for your app that is web based and not as installed for this purpose as you wont we getting any option to enter any website url for callback which is very important in this case.
and in webview delegate method webViewDidFinishLoad:
NSString *urlStr = [[webView.request URL] absoluteString];
NSArray *array = [urlStr componentsSeparatedByString:#"access_token="];
if(array.count > 1)
{
NSString *oauth_token = [[[array objectAtIndex:1] componentsSeparatedByString:#"&"] objectAtIndex:0];
//do something with the oauth token after this.
}
I wrote a code snippet to signin and post simple text to Google Plus with URL and thumb Image URL.
Try it
Take a look here:
http://code.google.com/p/google-api-objectivec-client/source/browse/#svn%2Ftrunk%2FExamples%2FBooksSample
http://code.google.com/p/google-api-objectivec-client/
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?
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.
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);
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
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.
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.
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.
I'm trying to post a link + status through my app, using this "popup" facebook window where the user is asked to log in, then asked to allow my app to his profile. Then I want him to be able to write a status, with a link I specify attached. This facebook popup would be triggered by a button, not at start of my app (in the documentation I found that they want me to implement it in the appDidFinish launching method...) But I don't want that, I want it like the popup facebook window is only triggered per button tap.
I'm trying to figure this out for a few days now, but finding that all tutorials are out-dated and the Facebook Developer documentation is very weak- atleast for for me. I already downloaded the Facebook-iOS-SDK with the API and JSON included from GitHub. I already did a few attempts, but the furthest I got is that the user was asked to log in, but not through my app, instead Safari opened and the log in field were there, not in my app.
Could someone please post some code, a basic tutorial I might find helpful, or point me to a good online tutorial? I already tried to post to iPhone Dev SDK forums, where other people also asked for this, but never got any help. So could someone out here please put together something that would help out all the newbies?
I want my login screen look like this, and the rest should be in a popup too:
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=439332&l=c04b210914&id=100001688115647
Thanks a lot in advance!
There is already a sample code in facebook-ios sdk you can see that there are already the code available for some things. Here is a code snippet from the older facebook API but this should work with the newer graph api too
- (void)setStatus:(id)target {
NSString *statusString = #"Testing iPhone Connect SDK";
NSDictionary *params = [NSDictionary dictionaryWithObjectsAndKeys:
statusString, #"status",
#"true", #"status_includes_verb",
nil];
[[FBRequest requestWithDelegate:self] call:#"facebook.users.setStatus" params:params];
}
WHat you can do is create a controller to handle all the facebook requests like a singleton class and on tap of button do something like this
- (IBAction)showFBLoginDialog:(id)sender {
if(LoggedInFacebook == NO) {
FBLoginDialog *dlg = [[[FBLoginDialog alloc] initWithSession:faceBookController._session] autorelease];
[dlg show];
}
else {
[faceBookController logoutUser];
}
}
If you need further help search on google and stackoverflow you will find a bunch of.
I want to publish information to user's wall from iphone application. I am using the Facebook SDK for iphone. I found in the documentation that I should use FBStreamDialog but this loads a form to the user and s/he write the story to be published, I don't want this behavior. I want to publish user actions at my application and user just needs to click share button, then the application should fill a template story and publish.
I found this use case was available before with FBFeedDialog but this is not supported via the API now.
Any suggestions, what I should do?
//Modified
here's an example for David's solution:
NSString *att = #"{\"name\":\"i\'m bursting with joy\",\"caption\": \"User rated the lolcat 5 stars\", \"description\": \"a funny looking cat\"}";
NSDictionary *attachment = [NSDictionary dictionaryWithObject:att forKey:#"attachment"];
[[FBRequest requestWithDelegate:self] call:#"facebook.stream.publish" params:attachment];
#"stream.publish"
I use this code occur error "The user hasn't authorized the application to perform this action"