In the Facebook timeline I am happy that I can now manually change the dates of previous photos that I have posted. But I would love to be able to do this through the graph API. I cannot see any exposed properties, though, when I look at the JSON data for one of these entries that I've already changed, and there is nothing documented here: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/photo/
created_time and updated_time don't change even when you manually change the date of an entry. Is there a hidden property that isn't documented yet?
It's possible that it's a limitation of the public Facebook API. You should submit is as a bug to facebook to let them have a look at it.
Related
I am trying to use Google's People API to pull the date of my last interaction (either email or calendar invite) with all my contacts. Basically whatever is in the red box in the screenshot below.
Google Contacts screenshot
I doesn't seem to be something that can be access via the People API, but I'd appreciate a confirmation. If anyone has found an alternative to get a similar data point (when was a person last contacted), it would be great !
I've tried pulling all the fields available through the API, or exporting contacts as a CSV, neither returned the date of last interaction.
With FQL being deprecated, is there an alternative graph-y way of fetching the post-comments from a specific user without resorting to downloading all comments first and enumerating them?
Before I could just trigger an FQL statement like
SELECT text FROM comment
WHERE post_id = '<postid>' AND fromid = '<uid>'
But since that is no longer supported without using the older API, I'm wondering if there's an alternative for v2.1 and up?
Why? I organise a fair amount of give-away-contests on Facebook and have a script that retrieves the amount of likes from the announcement post, picks a number of random ones and then retrieves the comments of those users on that same post.
As a side remark: I hate it that I as a page owner cannot retrieve a list of people that liked my own page via the API. I still have to check that manually each time.
Unfortunately there's no way to filter the comments by user directly with the current Graph API version.
If you're using a v2.0 app, you can still use FQL until August 7th 2016. I'd wait and see if FB amends the Graph API with similar functionality as FQL had in the future.
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.
related to Open Graph api for feed returning inconsistent results
When I publish a post on a page's feed using my App, facebook returns some id in the form of <page_id>_<post_id>, but when the same App receives a Real time Update from the same page—say a like or a comment—the parent_id field of the like or comment contains only the <post_id> part!
Is this a bug or what?
Here is the response from facebook engineers -
This is by design. For a realtime update generated by a comment, the parent_id will just show and not include the page_id.
For specific examples, please refer to our documentation (https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/page/#realtime) and look under the sub-sections "Feed Example."
I've been pouring over Facebook's Graph API but I can't seem to find any documentation with regards to retrieve comments users leave as they Like an Open Graph object (in my case, a web page with a Like button).
At a minimum, I would assume that there would be some way to retrieve comments from users whose privacy settings allow anybody to see their updates (I guess this might require me to know the UID of everybody who Likes my web page). Alternatively, there might be some method where user comments may be associated with the Open Graph object's stream instead.
Anybody?
To see a user's wall feed via the API (even public ones) you will to have them authenticate your app. Yeah, pretty crappy not to be able to query their public messages, but it is a current limitation of Facebook's API.