But I can’t. Let me explain.
Facebook offers a developer API that allows programmers to use the data stored by Facebook. One of the neat features is called “Facebook Query Language,” and allows you to execute queries on the data provided by Facebook, as if it were a giant database (oh, wait, it is). Earlier this afternoon I was wishing I could gather a list of all my friends and their website URLs (if any). Since many of my friends are on Facebook, I figured that Facebook would be a great place to start. But who wants to click through 600+ Facebook profiles copying down website addresses??? Not I … but that does sound like a great task for your average computer program, right?
Since the normal Facebook interface does not allow you to perform “report” style searches on your friend list, I jumped over to the developer docs. Sure enough, the query language can retrieve all sorts of cool information through the API – but not a friend’s website! In fact, no contact information is available through the API (I’m assuming this is for security purposes). Unfortunately this means that my nifty idea is moot… no automatically updating phone book, list of friend urls, etc is possible.
I’m sad.
3 responses so far »
1 Michael Chappell // Jan 31, 2008 at 12:26 am
Yay Facebook.
Boo Matt.
I don’t exactly want people to be able to just run a script and “mine” all of my contact information so I can receive more unsolicited “advertisements”.
2 Matthew Smith // Jan 31, 2008 at 12:32 am
Hey look … our resident “writer on strike” has returned to make some noise!
Although I am sad that I can’t easily make reports on the data contained by Facebook, you are right. It is a good thing that this data can’t be accessed by application developers (well mostly things like addresses and phone numbers) because it does prevent rogue use of data.
However, the website? Come on, let me have that!
3 That Pesky Facebook Query Thing // Feb 5, 2008 at 3:08 pm
[...] few days back, I mentioned that I wanted to query my Facebook social graph in order to pull out a list of my friends’ websites. Why? To put the in my blog roll. Anyway, [...]
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