[kwlug-disc] Scraping Facebook

[Khalid Baheyeldin]

Drupal (and other CMS's) have automated ways of sharing new content on
one's web site to Facebook.

For example

https://www.drupal.org/project/fb

But that is a one way thing: comments from others, posts from others,
..etc. all happen on Facebook itself, and need further integration with
APIs (that often change) to get something like what was referred to in the
initial email going.

On Sat, Dec 9, 2017 at 10:45 AM, Andrew Sullivan Cant <
acant at alumni.uwaterloo.ca> wrote:

> 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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>


-- 
Khalid M. Baheyeldin
2bits.com, Inc.
Fast Reliable Drupal
Drupal optimization, development, customization and consulting.
Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability. --  Edsger W.Dijkstra
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. --   Leonardo da Vinci
For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple, and
wrong." -- H.L. Mencken
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