Why I got so many posts without any content from Graph API?

Question

I am developing a social media monitoring service. And I'm now trying to fetch the posts and comments from a certain group of users.

However, I found that a lot of empty posts are fetched by Graph API https://graph.facebook.com/somebodysuid/posts?access_token=xxxx . That is, a lot of posts are of the following form:

`{ "id": "somebodysuid_xxxxxxxxxxxx",

     "from": {
        "name": "XXX YYY AAA",
        "id": "somebodysuid"
     },
     "type": "status",
     "created_time": "2011-08-03T05:49:11+0000",
     "updated_time": "2011-08-03T05:49:11+0000",
     "comments": {
        "count": 0
     }
  },
  {
     "id": "somebodysuid_yyyyyyyyyyyyyyy",
     "from": {
        "name": "XXX YYY AAA",
        "id": "somebodysuid"
     },
     "type": "status",
     "created_time": "2011-07-24T23:31:35+0000",
     "updated_time": "2011-07-24T23:31:35+0000",
     "comments": {
        "count": 0
     }
  },

Through these are indeed posts, but they're totally useless. The worst thing is, half of the data I fetched are of this kind....

Can somebody please explain why so many empty posts would the API fetch? Can this be solve by any way?

Are you able to view those posts on Facebook? If so, what are the privacy settings for those posts? And is the access token you are using authorizing your app on behalf of that particular user? — puffpio, Aug 31 '11 at 07:21
No, I can't see the empty posts fetched by the API. But I can see other posts on the user's wall. — shihpeng, Aug 31 '11 at 09:02

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 31 '11 at 07:32

Those posts are probably updates made through the "new share form" where users can tag places and friends and attach geo-locations without adding any additional message.

Those type of posts are typed as "status" but graph api does not return the other meta-datas yet (location, tags, etc...) that's why you see them empty.

Let's hope FB will fix that quickly :(

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 31 '11 at 16:29

I think FB has started to add activity information that appears on a Facebook web page, such as "John Doe is now friends with Tom Jones", or "Fred Smith and 2 others have changed their profile image". This activity information is a) incomplete in the returned feed and b) does odd things when you look for more information by asking the graph API for detail based on the posts id field.

My current guess is that this is new functionality for the feed - I have been unable to find documentation or mention of it. They are very difficult to process at this time, since they look like other things and contain no identifying detail.

Here is the question I posted looking for help. It give another example: Facebook graph "user/home" feed now contains activities as post items that are difficult to identify

Why I got so many posts without any content from Graph API?

2 Answers2