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Annoyingly, it seems the Graph API just can't do much of what it seems it ought to be able to. So far as I can tell, Facebook doesn't offer any convenient way
by Sniffnoy 15y ago
Annoyingly, it seems the Graph API just can't do much of what it seems it ought to be able to. So far as I can tell, Facebook doesn't offer any convenient way for me to read my friends' information -- that I have access to, on Facebook -- by automated means. (Or other people's info that's publically available.) This means I can't write a tool that makes a contact-info-list for me; if I want to assemble a list of phone numbers, for instance, I have to do it manually. (For phone numbers in particular -- but not for other things -- Facebook used to do this on the website, but this seems to be gone.) Nor can I do simple things like, say, given two people, whose friendslist I can view, determine which friends they have in common. Facebook lets me see mutual friends of me and another person, but not two other people. These are basic tools I should be able to write, but last I checked, the capability just wasn't there.
- tedunangst 15y agoI'm somewhat pleased friends' phone numbers aren't available. It means you don't have to worry about a friend clicking "Click here to backup your phone numbers" scams. Your inability to extract data about your friends is a kind of privacy feature. Automated access to your data, good; automated access to other people's data, bad.
- qznc 15y agoI wrote myself a script, which does this via screen-scraping once. Of course, this is a shaky solution. On the other hand, it does not require me to request an ID from Facebook or give permissions to any third-party app.