Question

I’ve used the iOS Facebook SDK before to post to one’s timeline or share through an app. However, now I want to just read a public stream, a politician’s Facebook stream. This is easy with Twitter. How do I do it with Facebook. I don’t want to log in or any app id’s. I just want to read the public stream of a particular user, that’s all.Thanks

Answer 1

Unfortunately you can’t anymore. Even though the information is “public” the graph API was changed last summer to require an access token even to do that.

Graph API PROFILE_ID/feed and PROFILE_ID/posts now requires
access_token

As stated last week, the Graph API PROFILE_ID/feed/ for a Page,
Application, User or Group and PROFILE_ID/posts for a Page or User now
requires a valid access_token to access the wall or posts of the
corresponding object (where previously no access_token was required).

https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/510/

Basically you now are required to create a facebook app and get an AppId. You don’t actually have to “log in”; since you just want public data you only need to request a valid access token with your AppId.

See this example/blog (It’s PHP but the important bit is the last example showing that you only need to do a simple HTTP request to get the token):
http://illuminatikarate.com/blog/facebook-graph-api-requires-access-token-for-feed-access/ .

It would appear the moving target that is the Facebook API … has moved again. You can no longer just do that. You actually have to request the read_stream permission even to read public data.