Question

I normally get Facebook JSON data that look like this (taken from an example):

 {    "data": [
      {
         "id": "X999_Y999",
         "from": {
            "name": "Tom Brady", "id": "X12"
         },
        ........
         "type": "status",
         "created_time": "2010-08-02T21:27:44+0000",
         "updated_time": "2010-08-02T21:27:44+0000"
      }    ] }

}

Anyway, I want to find “Share” click-actions in Facebook, that is, the actions specifically created by users who clicked the “share this link” button.

1) It appears that the API does not explicitly encode such actions…

2) However, they are explicit: Facebook SHARE functions are different than “likes”, “comments”, “wall posts”, “tags”, “image postings”, etc….

3) How can I parse whether or not a Facebook action was, indeed, Shared from a standard Facebook JSON data array?

4) Is there a way to determine if X shared an action by Y ?

Answer 1

1) It appears that the API does not explicitly encode such actions…

Clicking the “share” button triggers annotation of a post with the
“Links” facebook application … implicitly conveying the fact that
a share action was executed. Thus, if we see that a post act is
associated with an “application” field, then we can know that the
user indeed was “sharing” the link content when creating this post.

2) However, they are explicit: Facebook SHARE functions are different than “likes”, “comments”, “wall posts”, “tags”, “image postings”, etc….

YES share actions ARE different then likes : They are created by a
different application, and also, the convey a specificity of the
type of user action.

3) How can I parse whether or not a Facebook action was, indeed, a “Share” from a standard Facebook JSON data array?

You can implement the parsing logic of (1) by scanning the JSON map for a
“application” field, which contains a “id” key, that has
value of “2309869772” – this is the ID of the facebook “Links”
action.

This can be seen in the json as such :

“application”: {
“name”: “Links”,
“id”: “2309869772”
},

Of course, there are other shares, for example… a sharing of a
photo. This is also a link, but it is conveyed differently. This
can be seen in the following share action snippet, wherein somebody
shared a photo created by jay vyas :

“properties”: [
{
“name”: “By”,
“text”: “Jay Vyas”,
“href”: “http://www.facebook.com/jvyas1”
}
],

4) SADLY : It appears that, share actions don’t directly link to the social action created by a facebook user. For example, if X shares a url that Y Posted —

a) the url will get replicated X’s post**

b) we cannot directly extract the particular id of Y’s post which X
shared.**

Thus : I surmise the following : we cannot create a network of
personal relationships and shared content using the current
facebook API.

I would certainly appreciate other answers or insights to these thoughts…