Facebook GraphAPI Waterfall!

November 7, 2010

ANDREW I DONT CARE ABOUT YOUR STORIES! JUST GIVE ME THE LINK! >> http://andrewmohawk.com/facefall/

So its been a long weekend, but i had a lot of time to myself this weekend, and decided to play a bit with some of the side projects i’ve been interested in.

With regards to the previous posts, the code has been updated and fixed, ill update the post a little later — but hopefully we (@Paterva) will be releasing the transforms to the public this week so everyone can play!

One of the first ones i wanted to tackle was faceFall — essentially twitterfall for the facebook graphAPI, so you can quickly search for a topic and watch the status messages / links fall down as they arrive :)

So check it out: http://andrewmohawk.com/facefall/ ( yes i realise the UI looks like ass, but i cant get a nice design to work.. if you have one or want to build one, PLEASE let me know!)

Some stuff id need to fix:

Removing doesn’t work well ( probably my lame ass jscript )
Doesnt do any correlation (like same person featured on x Topics)
Needs more info — only does status/links atm

If anyone wants this and wants to help, feel free to comment msg me!

I also cleaned the whiteboard:

Technical Info after the break!
So accessing the facebook graphAPI search is trivial, you simply browse to https://graph.facebook.com/search?q=<yourterm>&type=post , and you will get out some simply json like so:

   "data": [
      {
         "id": "100000065889023_127068694016086",
         "from": {
            "name": "Joe Mitchell",
            "id": "100000065889023"
         },
         "message": "had a wicked time fishing over the waterfront with Andrew Young, Owain Cadman and caught six gobby's",
         "type": "status",
         "created_time": "2010-11-07T19:16:13+0000",
         "updated_time": "2010-11-07T19:16:13+0000"
      },
      {
         "id": "1393843973_170920819601364",
         "from": {
            "name": "Tabi Harvey",
            "id": "1393843973"
         },
         "message": "Andrew is now a week old and is doing great he is a little fighter like tristan was thank god for that and hope he gets better everyday",
         "type": "status",
         "created_time": "2010-11-07T19:16:13+0000",
         "updated_time": "2010-11-07T19:16:13+0000",
         "attribution": "Mobile Web"
      }
],
   "paging": {
      "previous": "https://graph.facebook.com/search?q=andrew&amp;type=post&amp;limit=25&amp;since=2010-11-07T19%3A16%3A13%2B0000",
      "next": "https://graph.facebook.com/search?q=andrew&amp;type=post&amp;limit=25&amp;until=2010-11-07T19%3A11%3A57%2B0000"
   }
}

So its really just a matter of piecing together the code with some php like so:

 -1 &amp;&amp; $term)
	{
		$url = "https://graph.facebook.com/search?q=\"" . urlencode($term) . "\"&amp;type=post";
		$ch = curl_init();
		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, 0);
		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, 0);
		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, 0);
		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FAILONERROR, 0);
		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
		$returned = curl_exec($ch);
		$returned = json_decode($returned,TRUE);
		curl_close ($ch);
		$posts = $returned["data"];
		$facefallResults = array();
 
		if(is_array($posts))
		{
			foreach($posts as $p)
			{
				$userDetails = $p["from"];
				if(in_array($p["type"],array("status","link")))
				{
					if($p["type"] == "status")
					{
						$msg = $p["message"];
					}
					if($p["type"] == "link")
					{
						if(isset($p["message"]))
						{
							$msg = $p["message"];
						}
						else
						{
							$msg = "<a href="&quot; . $p[&quot;link&quot;] . &quot;">" . $p["link"] . "</a>";
						}
					}
					$finalMsg = $msg;
					if(strlen($finalMsg) &gt; 100)
					{
						$msg = substr($finalMsg,0,100) . "...";
					}
					$currentDate = date('Y-m-d h:i:s', strtotime($p["created_time"]));
					$lastDate = date('Y-m-d h:i:s', strtotime($lastID));
					if($currentDate &gt; $lastDate)
					{
						$facefallResults[] = array("id"=&gt;$p["created_time"],"message"=&gt;$finalMsg,"UID" =&gt; $userDetails["id"], "Name" =&gt; $userDetails["name"], "Pic"=&gt;"http://graph.facebook.com/" . $userDetails["id"] . "/picture","phrase"=&gt;$term,"createdtime"=&gt;$currentDate,"fullMSG"=&gt;$msg);
					}
				}
			}
		}
		$facefallResults = array_reverse($facefallResults);
		echo json_encode($facefallResults);
	}
?&gt;

And throwing in some ajax :)

Let me know if anyone wants to ask anything on it and so on :) I think i’ll build a quick RSS feed for this later on, its probably about 30 mins of work from here, perhaps even tonight still :)

Cheers,
Andrew

Facebook GraphAPI Waterfall!

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