Question

Similar to the ability to subscribe to a user’s posts on Facebook, users can since today, follow other users’ Open Graph activities from a specific app. For example, on a movie review site, users can follow their favorite movie reviewers.

There’s no example of this yet, but if you submit the new follow action you’ll get the code and have an idea of how it goes. It’s very easy: hit(GET) https://graph.facebook.com/me/og.follows with a token and a profile ID. What I don’t get is the third_party_id.

I have read this sentence over and over and still can’t decode it: “This tag is not required, and follow actions will succeed without it, though followers will not see activity in their News Feeds without this.”

How to use the third_party_id? And most important, from now on, only the actions from the the people I subscribe to will been seen on my feed?

Full info here: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/actions/builtin/follows/

Answer 1

What I don’t get is the third_party_id.

If you’re posting a follow action not for a facebook profile, but for an URL (as in the example, profile=http://www.rottentomatoes.com/celebrity/tom_hanks/), then that page has to have a <meta property="fb:profile_id" …> element to tell Facebook what to actually follow.

To get the third_party_id, you query the Graph API for a user with /userid/?fields=third_party_id.

(I’m guessing using the third_party_id in this place instead of the actual user id is just recommended for the simple reason, that this way not everyone who looks into the HTML code of the rottentomatoes page can see what FB uid Tom Hanks actually has.)

If there is no corresponding user on Facebook for the URL that’s being followed – then there isn’t anything to follow at all, because there will be no posts on Facebook that could been shown in a user’s feed.