Facebook Id changes - facebook-graph-api

We are revising our Facebook login, is it possible that the user's Facebook Id will change?
We are hearing rumours about the fact that it is possible that the id's will change. I'm aware of the fact that that recently increased their integer size?
We will not replace the Facebook API keys.

In an App, the IDs will not change - that would be a massive problems for a lot of Apps. You get "App Scoped IDs", so if you use another App, each user will get a different ID again.

Related

Facebook opengraph insights api on specific post id from my app

I want to build a dashboard that returns more customized insights from the insights generated by app.
The app is a facebook connect website that users visit and view a list of products. They can post to facebook about that particular product by sharing a custom story that incorporates that product on their timeline.
When I go to the insights for my app, it does a great job of showing me all social impressions for all custom stories that were generated on my site.
I'd like to narrow that down even more for specific products.
My plan is to record the object ids that are generated by these actions and link them to a partucular product in my database.
I'd then like to create a new dashboard page that will allow me to login, request read_insights permission from me and then use that object_id:product mapping from my database to show how many social impressions where recorded for a given product's object_ids.
Is this possible? I've read alot about it but still haven't found the most elegant way to get a segmented report of social impressions per type of content that was posted.
Thanks for your time.
The implementation all depends on which platform you want your app to run on.
The first major component is you must have a Facebook developers account which is easy to signup for. Just go to developers.facebook.com and register. Takes like 2 mins. After that you will need to create your first app and add the correct domain name where your app will be hosted and what platform it will run on. (iOS, Android, Web, ect.) Once that is finished you can make your app public so you can use the Facebook API in your code.
For the app creation itself. The first thing you need to do is import the correct API for your platform. Which you can find a walk through at https://developers.facebook.com/docs/. Once the API is imported you must build a Facebook object which contains your app id and possibly app secret. If you're using JavaScript you don't want to use the app secret because it will be visible to the public.
Now that you have your Facebook object you must require the app users to log in and grant permission to your app. You can add extended permissions to your log in process by adding a scope value to the log in button generated by Facebook. Here is an example.
<fb:login-button id="loginBtn" max_rows="1" scope="basic_info,read_insights,manage_pages" size="medium" show_faces="false" auto_logout_link="true"></fb:login-button>
After the user is logged in you can now query information from the users account using Facebook Api calls to Social Graph. Facebook also provides a tool to help you figure out what information you can query. https://developers.facebook.com/tools/explorer
Everything else you want to do with the app can be done by Facebook API calls. You just need to insure you grant the user the correct permissions before making the API calls.
API calls are a little different depending on which language syntax you are using but they all follow the same data model and return some array of responses which can be parsed using JSON or the standard array format. The Graph Explorer tool listed above will show you the output for your queries so you can handle them accordingly.
I hope this helps gets you started.
EDITED
Here's the implementation in JavaScript
function getMetric(){
// make the API call
FB.api(
"/{app-id}/insights/application_opengraph_story_impressions",
function (response) {
if (response && !response.error) {
/* handle the result */
}
}
);
}
Here's the reference now that Facebook docs are back up https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/reference/insights
application_opengraph_story_impressions will probably give you the total impression of all stories made by your app. I ran it against my Facebook app and it came back empty but I don't have any stories so it might work with your's. Also to note in the documentation there is an * by this metric and I could't find what that means.
I'm pretty sure that right now Facebook don't give developers ability to get insights about app custom stories.
Currently Facebook documentation has the following Graph APIs for Insights data:
/{page-id}/insights
/{app-id}/insights
/{domain-id}/insights
/{post-id}/insights (where this is a Page post)
So /{post-id}/insights won't work because custom story is actually user's post and others endpoints don't apply to your case.
As far as I know the only other option to access Insights is FQL. For that you'd use insights table in a manner similar to this:
SELECT ... FROM insights WHERE object_id = ... AND metric = ... AND end_time = ... AND period = ...
Now most likely this also won't work with your custom story posts (I don't have posts which I could try it on right now, so I can't tell) but at least it is not explicitly stated so in the documentation, so you should probably try it out.
UPDATE:
I wasn't able to get any insights data via FQL, although as far as I understand the following code should have gave me at least something (object id is for my page):
SELECT breakdown, end_time, event, metric, object_id, period, value FROM insights WHERE object_id = 224981264214413 and metric = 'page_fans' and period = period('lifetime') and end_time = 1395597892
But it results just in
{
"data": []
}
Facebook also has some pretty old bug report about similar topic: https://developers.facebook.com/x/bugs/508088155954330/ where they confirmed the issue, assigned it, and... did nothing to fix it for 6 months.
In case FQL doesn't work, my suggestion to you is - use your own analytics code to track the creation of custom stories and get the friend count of the users. It won't show you the real exposure of the posts but at least you will see some data on which types of custom stories where posted more often and what was the maximum potential friend count that could have seen them. By the way - to make charting easier, you could use Google Analytics events for that.

Do I really need to register an app to show a simple 'friends' list on my website?

I want to use the Facebook (Graph) API to show a list of names and pictures of friends of a facebook account (which I own). Do I really need to register my website as an app for this? Since I don't really think of my website as an app... Or can I somehow get an access token that doesn't expire since I can grant access to this list of friends myself?
Think of an app on Facebook as an API Key. Your App is how Facebook identifies who is making the call, what permissions you have, and if you are abusing the system or not.
And no, you can't get access to most Graph API data without a valid Facebook App.

Saving Sitecore DMS Visitor info to a user

With Sitecore DMS you can create Profiles and show specific pages based on the user's visiting habits. This information is stored using a cookie so whenever the user comes back they have the same visitor profile. But if they delete their cookies or switch browsers that information is gone. Now what I want to do is save this visitor information to a sitecore user, in that they can log in and their visitor profiles will be the same as when they left, no matter where they are or what browser they are using. I've been trying to figure this out for a while now but without success. Whenever I login with a user and create a specific profile, that profile is deleted as soon as i log out. Is this even possible for Sitecore, because it seems rather silly to only have profiles based on cookies when cookies are deleted constantly.
With Sitecore Analytics, you have two tracking cookies, one is for Session--the other for GlobalSession (which doesn't expire across normal asp.net sessions). Unfortunately, Sitecore doesn't track profile key scores based on GlobalSession, but by a single asp.net session. The entire system is based around this, and it's very disappointing. '
To get around this, I was using OMS and use Reflector to disasssemble and rewrite some of the analytics code to record by global session. It also required a couple of schema changes as well as new rules... pretty extensive work. At the end of the day, because of the size of the database and our need for a very limited number of features, I ended up creating a single table and recording profile key values in that by globalsession.
From what I understand, the schema has changed from OMS to DMS, but the single most important factor, that data is recorded by session, has not changed.
With regard to storing the User's id, you can associate this with a 'tag' which is stored, I believe, with the globalsessionid, at least in OMS. However, Sitecore doesn't update the tag records, so you'll end up with multiple records per global session. If you're storing this value on every request, that table will bloat quickly.
There are a couple of reasons for this... not the least of which is that in many cases, you don't have a logged in user to correlate this information with. The profile data isn't stored in cookies... it's stored in the Analytics table. But it's associated with a cookie that has a unique ID and once that has been deleted, the ID (hopefully!) won't be used again.
A suggestion for how to get around this here in this StackOverflow answer.

How to use Facebook APIs to show one's friends list to other visitors?

I'm able to fetch my friends list using Facebook API (which requires me to log into my FB account) and I'm trying to show my friends list to other people visit my site.
I've tried using Twitter and its quite simple. https://api.twitter.com/1/friends/ids.json?cursor=-1&screen_name=codef0rmer returns my followers ids.
Is that possible using Facebook API, If yes, How to do that?
To access the /friends connection you need a valid access token for the current session. This means you can't access this connection for other users
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/user/
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/fql/friend/
This means that unless you get a users friends and store them in your database, you won't be able to do this. ( Unless you use longer living access tokens (I say longer living as offline access is being deprecated)
Saying this, I'm not sure if you are allowed to store this information. I know friendslists aren't allowed to be shown to other users so this is potentially dangerous territory on facebook TOS. The privacy policy is here https://developers.facebook.com/policy/ but I think this is something you may need to clarify with Facebook directly as it looks like a slightly grey area

Facebook integration... Where to start?

I recently put a django project of mine into its beta stages and would really like to integrate more with social media, particularly facebook.
Now there are so many facebook integrations out there... I don't know where to start but, I'll tell you what I am after.
My sites publishes content with photos and also user related data (which site doesn't)
on each individual page I already have a facebook like button that basically has the absolute url of that page
so for instance:
http://my-site.com/url-1
http://my-site.com/url-345345
http://my-site.com/url-456456456
When a user likes this particular url I would like them to become a Fan on my facebook site/page as well.
I also added the FB opengraph tool which is a bit more informative once a user likes it. But it still does not publish any statistics to my page.
Can someone give me a bit of an understanding on what the best option is for this type of integration?
As a security option for the user, Facebook has never allowed third party access to "become a fan."
If you want to record locally when someone presses the "Like" button, you'll have to implement it locally (copy the presentation, and query Facebook yourself), so you can intercept the event. I've done that; it's not too hard.
I suggest you review the Connect Terms of Service to see what it is you're allowed to do: http://developers.facebook.com/policy/