2 questions about using Like buttons for voting (not for promotions) - facebook-like

My questions are about this (pasted from http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like/)...
"What makes up the number shown on my Like button?
"The number shown is the sum of:
-The number of likes of this URL
-The number of shares of this URL (this includes copy/pasting a link back to Facebook)
-The number of likes and comments on stories on Facebook about this URL
-The number of inbox messages containing this URL as an attachment."
With that in mind, let's say I create a feature to let users submit ideas to improve my site, and I want to let users vote on the ideas by clicking Like buttons next to each idea.
(For simplicity, let's also say it's okay if they click more than one Like button.)
When a user clicks a Like button, a story about it shows up in his/her friends' newsfeeds, which brings up my 2 questions:
1.) If one of those friends comments on it with "That idea sucks," will that comment still add to the Likes count?
I know the content of the comment doesn't matter, but that user is clearly expressing his dislike of the idea, not liking it.
2.) Can the same user generate 2 or more Likes?
From the above, it seems like he/she could click the Like button, and then send a FB message with the URL as an attachment, which would generate another Like.
Thanks for the clarity!
P.S. This other thread was useful, but there were no conclusive answers:
Voting for items via facebook like?

Related

extracting data from facebook using graph api

how can i extract name list && phone numbers of the users liking certain page ?
I have tried using software called facepager but i couldn't extract names .
note:I'm not the owner of the page
You'd most likely have to write code yourself to do something like this. However,
Almost no-one publicly shares their phone number.
Facebook try to prevent this kind of data collection.
Even when facebook list's "likers" of a page, it'll wait till you scroll down to load more. You'd have to play with your browsers debug tools and look into where it get's that data from
https://www.facebook.com/search/<group id here>/likers
In the end you'll probably not get much better than just searching for the page and clicking each person's profile because the site is designed to not let what you're trying to do happen...

Like button "Post to Facebook" not submitting

I'm seeing some complicated, not-documented behavior with the like button on a couple of sites I manage.
Here are two examples:
http://action.anthonybrown.com/secondterm/thanks/
http://handsoffwomenshealth.com/thanks/
In both cases these are signup form "thank you" pages where the intended purpose is to "like" the actual main landing page.
In both cases, users can click the like button and the like is actually registered back to Facebook.
In both cases, the popup "flyout" to allow users to post comments / statuses shows properly. However, when you fill out a comment and click "Post to Facebook," nothing happens. Your comment is not posted to Facebook and the dialog does not disappear.
A comment to a bug report here:
See Comment 1
...suggests that this is expected behavior when links generated by the like button are "protected" by Facebook and shown with a "please be careful" interstitial when clicked on by a user in facebook.com.
When I use the like button myself, links in my activity posts about both pages do go through this "protection" mechanism:
See Comment 2
To be clear, I'm not actually certain that the failure to post a comment is related to the "please be careful" warning, but it does seem to be correlated.
Google, Facebook, and Stack Exchange searches all suggest that this issue is reasonably common, but provide almost zero insight into why it's happening and how it can be mitigated.
Any help in understanding/solving the issue would be greatly appreciated.

Facebook Like Button Count for URLS that Already Have Likes/Shares/Comments

I am trying to implement a like button on a blog. The blog gets a decent amount of traffic and most posts get 10-30 likes, 5-10 shares and any number of comments on Facebook. I am implementing a like button for each post using the iFrame code copied straight from Facebook's Like Button page (http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like/). When I do test URLS, like "test.com" a count will show up; however, when I use a URL from the site that I know has a combination of shares/likes/comments, no count shows. Additionally, when I run the link through the graph.facebook.com, it shows that there are shares (e.g., http://graph.facebook.com/http://test.com). Now, if I pressed the like button I do get a count of "1" to show up. My questions are thus:
1) Should I expect the count to show up for posts that have shares/likes/comments, but I'm just now implementing the button for it?
2) Is there anything special that needs to be done with the URL sent? URL encoding? Adding/not adding "http://"?
3) Is there a latency to the count? For instance are the counts cached and updated at different times?
Thanks for your help!
1) I don't think they will ever show up if they haven't so far.. (see answer 3)
2) No. An URL with or without http:// will be treated as the same URL. But I recommend using http://
3) If by latency you mean delay, then no. Likes/shares/comments count are updated almost instantly.

FAcebook like button -the meaning of the number near it

What makes up the number shown on my Like button? The number shown is
the sum of:
•The number of likes of this URL
•The number of shares of this URL
(this includes copy/pasting a link back to Facebook)
•The number of
likes and comments on stories on Facebook about this URL
•The number
of inbox messages containing this URL as an attachment.
Ok, now if user A likes something, and then user A shares the URL, will I have 2 likes displayed near the button? Or each user can only be counted once
Thanks, I try to understand this because I need to write an app around it
Facebook have a pretty good guide and API for this if you do want to make use of it.
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like/
As far as the process goes, this explanation is better than anything I could come up with. But the long and short of it is, the more people who click on it independently, the more it will increment (See below). Therefore in your example user A likes it (+1), he shares it but only when his friend clicks like when it increment again.
http://www.adsforfacebook.com/the-facebook-like-button.php

Does this "invite friends" system for my website sound flawed to you?

I would like to have a system where my users can invite their friends. We prefer not to use a URL shortener when sending the invite link but it is also important that the link be relatively short. I am thinking the best way to accomplish this is just give each user a "profile username" like "tonyamoyal12" and let them request a new unique one if they want.
When my users send out invites, it will send out a URL like http://mydomain/invite/profile_username and essentially if the invitee logs in at that URL, the inviter gets credit. Can anyone think of drawbacks to this approach? Most invite URL's have hashes to verify the integrity of the invite but I think my approach works fine.
UPDATE
The profile username is that of the INVITER not INVITEE. So a user signs up on the INVITER'S profile page and therefore the inviter gets a "point" for having someone sign up on his page.
Thanks!
In these types of systems, you don't usually assign any user data (i.e., user names) before the invitee has actually signed up, and it may be a bit of a pain to get that kind of URL working depending on the framework you're using.
The process is normally:
Invite a user, which sends them an e-mail.
Invitee clicks through a link in the e-mail to go to the site's main registration page.
Invitee registers with a valid user name of their choosing, and based on some unique random key (included in the clickthrough link), you can do your business logic with the two users involved (add to friends list, or whatever).
The drawback to generating your own user names is that they're more likely to be guessed than a random number, because you'll likely use English words in them. If you generate and assign random user names (i.e., "s243k2ldk8sdl"), the invitee is not going to be pleased since they have to do extra work to change the user name, or somehow remember that name.
EDIT, since I didn't understand the question very well.
I think the scheme is fine, except I would just use the invitor's user name in the URL and not allow them to change it (why allow it?). The only issue is if there is some kind of limit put on the number of invites (or maybe there is a reward for each invite), where you'd want to secure each clickthrough with some kind of unique hash value only valid for the invitor's URL.
EDIT 2
Since the users in the system do not have user names assigned, you could go either way. Allowing "user name" assignment on a first-come, first-served basis would be fine, as this would let everyone share their URL more easily with friends since it's memorable and can simply be typed in. However, that goes out the window if a unique key is required to sign up... in which case, it's going to be simpler to just not implement the user name thing and direct everyone to a single registration page of some kind.
Why not just create your own bespoke URL shortening?
If the reason you are avoiding URL-shortening is that you don't want to depend on external companies then that could be a good solution for you.
You can't independently track the invites. At some point you may want to know how many invites went out from a user vs. how many were accepted. With this single URL system you can't track that information.
Bots can easily be written to spam such a system. (Perhaps solved with captcha on resulting pages)
well if the website is large you will get name conflicts, and you will be dependent on the inviter putting in the invitees name which they could do poorly.
If you want to do it that way then you will have to deal with name clashes.
Also it is possible that someone could come along and decide to randomly type in names to see if they get it hit. Say I wanted to be nosey and spy on a friend to see if they are sending out invites to other friends.
EDIT: ahh ok. well if they are just clicking a link to go to the inviter then thats not a problem. That seems perfectly normal and there is no secret about exposed usernames.
You could create a unique hash for each invite and keep an association of hashes with user names. This would require a bit of storage overhead, but you could have expiration of invites to help combat that.
So http://mydomain/invite/RgetSqtu would be an example link, with a DB table that stores RgetSqtu/profile until it is used.
You would probably want to provide a helpful error page if the hash could not be found, like the following:
We are sorry but the invite you entered could not be found. This could be caused by the invite being typed incorrectly, being used already, or being too old (invites expire after 3 days).
I'd suggest passing the inviter's username in the querystring, and have that querystring fill either an editable or non-editable textbox on the new user registration page. That way you still have just one registration page, the URL is short, and users get credit for referring friends.
http://mydomain/invite/register.html?inviter=invitersUsername
leads to
First Name: _________
Last Name: _________
Referred By: invitersUsername
If I understand the setting correctly an existing user creates invites by giving emails of their friends to which your system will send a mail with in that the [inviteUrl]/[inveter'sUserName].
So in the case I send a mail to invite you, the url would be:
www.yourThang.com/invite/borisCallens
Every time somebody visits this I (the user borisCallens) gets a point.
What would stop me from visiting this url a gazillion times and thus win the invite-your-friend game?