Question

I’m a python programmer and I’d like to know if it’s possible to deal with some Facebook statistics? I’ve heard a lot of things about Facebook Graphs and Facebook API.

So if someone know how can I proceed to have access to statistics for a Facebook page via Python (without parsing the data with Mechanize), it should be very helpful.

I’m not looking for a complete tutorial, but I’m reading a lot of different things over the internet, so just want to have your advice on where can I dig 🙂

My main idea is monitoring Likes for exemple.

Thanks in advance !

Answer 1

Finally found kind of a solution by using graph.facebook.com/your_page :

#!/usr/bin/python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

from time import strftime, gmtime
import csv
from urllib2 import urlopen
from simplejson import loads
c = csv.writer(open('FB_Monitoring.csv', "a"), delimiter=';')
First = ['Name', 'Likes', 'Talking About']
c.writerow(First)

source = open("FBPAGES.txt", "r")
FacebookPages = source.readlines()


for Page in FacebookPages:
    Page = Page.replace('facebook.com','graph.facebook.com')
    content = loads(urlopen(Page).read())
    liste = [content['name'],content['likes'],content['talking_about_count']]
    c.writerow(liste)

This script is using FBPAGES.txt (list of Facebook pages URLs, line by line). It counts the number of Likes, and Talking About and put them into a CSV file.

Can be improved, it’s just a draft 😉