[kwlug-disc] Scraping Facebook

[Andrew Sullivan Cant]

The indieweb has some wiki pages about sending things to facebook that
have been posted to your own site:

https://indieweb.org/POSSE_to_Facebook

And some more general information about interfacing with facebook:

https://indieweb.org/Facebook

It also mentions:

> How to PESOS from
>
> You can use the Facebook API to PESOS your posts, but as of the 2.x
> API, not your comments or likes.

Those pages link to some projects which are already doing various
pulling and pushing from Facebook.

Andrew


On 05/12/17 14:24, Paul Nijjar via kwlug-disc wrote:
> At the Doctorow talk yesterday, somebody asked an astute question
> about network effects. She was not on Facebook, but all of her friends
> were, and she was finding it harder to resist its creepy tendrils. 
> But she wanted a non-creepy Facebook experience (which Doctorow
> suggested was possible). What would the transition from Facebook to
> something non-creepy look like, given that all her friends were on
> Facebook now?
> 
> Doctorow suggested that the woman write a program that would scrape
> Facebook's content and present it to end users. Then those end users
> could apply their own filters and algorithms to the content in
> non-creepy ways. This software would be a bridge in the sense that
> posts to this abstraction layer would be fed back to Facebook. 
> 
> I am not seeing how this could work. Facebook controls the data on its
> servers, and it permits access to its API via keys. It decides who
> gets to access its data and for what purposes. If some subversive
> startup tried to scrape its data, wouldn't it just shut down that
> startup by locking it out of its API? If end users were the ones
> logging into Facebook and running this app (so the end users were
> authenticating, not the app) then wouldn't Facebook be able to lock
> the end users out? That would be an effective way of killing the
> startup right quick. 
> 
> I am guessing that such a service would be against the Facebook Terms
> of Service in any case. 
> 
> Facebook does have a way to back up your data. That could be used as
> an input to this program. But as far as I know this process is not
> automated (surprise, surprise), and it is not that helpful. 
> 
> In short, I am not seeing how this idea could work. But maybe I am
> being dumb again. Maybe such clients already exist? How well does
> Facebook support cross-posting to other social networks?
> 
> - Paul
> 


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