Is there a way, using facebook API, to retrieve any historical data about user?

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litwol's picture
Posted by litwol on September 23, 2011 at 4:45pm

I am looking for a way to retrieve historical data about users using facebook api. such things as which posts user liked in the past, which events user RSVP'd in the past, perhaps even friendship statuses from the past. Have you guys come across something similar? I've spent considerable amount of time yesterday learning facebook graph api as thoroughly as i could and was not able to find any such data. more so, i find that taking all data available via facebook api it will not be possible to reconstruct any historical data. I'm eagerly looking for anyone to point out my mistake as i rather be wrong and find access to historical data than not. thx.

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Timeline, maybe

Posted by Dave Cohen on September 23, 2011 at 5:17pm
Dave Cohen's picture

As far as I know, only some portions of "the graph" have dates associated with them. For example, a checking to some location includes a date. I think a comment or wall post does too. But a Like or friendship does not.

However everything is always changing with facebook and just yesterday they announced something called Timeline. It may expose more of this sort of thing to developers, but I don't know for sure. It was just announced at f8 and you can probably still watch the presentations at http://www.facebook.com/f8.

I've ran several tests and

Posted by litwol on September 23, 2011 at 6:19pm
litwol's picture

I've ran several tests and found that User object has "likes" connection. upon examining that connection i found that it returned no data for things that i liked. facebook graph api states that you can get a list of people that liked a certain thing, but from my observation you cannot get a list of all things any single user liked, making it impossible to reconstruct this relationship because you simply cant get a list of everything like-able on facebook (to compute the user -> {stuff i liked} relationship} ).

P.S. the only "liked" information User object is connected to are actual pages or people that have the "like" button which user clicked. other (and more interesting) things like wall posts, pictures, videos, checkins are not stored in the User->likes connection.


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