API and Other Platform Product Changes

word of warning to anyone who wants to integrate with facebook. although their blog posts say they are only removing select endpoints, as the comments in the link above indicate, they have basically shut off access to core endpoints well beyond what they listed. instead of errors, the endpoint returns empty data.<p>this is extremely disappointing. our app was reviewed by FB (including source code), we have thousands of impacted users, and FB gave no indication that they would start doing this (and the issue was silent).<p>is a walled garden better than an API that lets users share their data? should we shut down the entire graph because of a few bad actors? is this how FB treats developers?

Some argue that the recent FB and Instagram API neuterings are in response to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. However, last September, Facebook silently neutered the ability for people to gather posts from <i>public</i> Facebook pages via the Graph API, which was damaging for FB Page research: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developers.facebook.com&#x2F;bugs&#x2F;1838195226492053&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developers.facebook.com&#x2F;bugs&#x2F;1838195226492053&#x2F;</a>

The events API had already been pretty crippled some time ago, looks like it&#x27;s been made close to entirely useless now.<p>This is interesting to me, cause while I think their motivation was mostly about PR (although who knows, it&#x27;s just kremlinological speculation), events are the main thing that keep many people I know from abandoning facebook -- it&#x27;s the only way to find out about what&#x27;s going on in many social circles. I contemplated trying to make something that used API to keep you in the loop on events on FB without having to actually use FB; it already wasn&#x27;t really possible, now _really_ not possible.<p>Although wait, there is still iCal feeds for at least some read-only access.... okay, back to the my own research on the matter. :)

For reference, this is a temporary pause to review policies and make necessary adjustments as per this status.<p>&gt; Description We are pausing all new messaging experiences (including new authentications on approved apps) on the platform while we review our policies and make necessary adjustments. Learn more here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;messenger.fb.com&#x2F;newsroom&#x2F;messenger-platform-changes-in-development&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;messenger.fb.com&#x2F;newsroom&#x2F;messenger-platform-changes...</a>.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developers.facebook.com&#x2F;status&#x2F;issues&#x2F;104197713763517&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developers.facebook.com&#x2F;status&#x2F;issues&#x2F;10419771376351...</a>

I&#x27;ve tried to tell companies time and time again that building the core foundation of the business on an external service like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter is doomed in the end. This happened 10 years ago when Twitter locked down a lot of their API access more, and is happening again now.<p>The CEOs and CTOs of those companies never listen, thinking &quot;this time will be different&quot;, and yet it isn&#x27;t. People in those positions don&#x27;t like hearing truth that conflicts with their deeply held belief that they are different and their product&#x2F;service (or mining of user data) is special and will make it through some loophole.<p>I wish I could monetize saving companies and investors millions of dollars with this advice, but I haven&#x27;t figured that out. No one likes to hear &#x27;no&#x27;

Many of our apps have broken from these changes. We didn&#x27;t receive any clear communication from Facebook that this would happen.<p>The <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developers.facebook.com&#x2F;status&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developers.facebook.com&#x2F;status&#x2F;</a> page says this has been an issue since March 21st.

Kind of nice to get to step away to be honest.<p>Here&#x27;s an example of what happens if you try to request something:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;hOR7lbK" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;hOR7lbK</a>

Time to circle the wagons and protect the core business. Collecting information and selling ads is their bread and butter. Giving third parties access to that data in order to build things gave them great marginal gains on their way to the top (sort of like Twitter), but in the current political climate the risks <i>far</i> outweigh whatever incremental gains they could realize going forward.<p>Don&#x27;t expect the API back any time soon.

&gt;friendlists is deprecated<p>Will this stop me from seeing Facebook friends that also use an application&#x2F;service from within that application&#x2F;service? For example, getting friend suggestions in Blizzard&#x27;s or Epic Games launcher for Facebook friends.

Holy shit, I&#x27;m not even using the Facebook API at the moment but this was infuriating to read. Please, someone make an FB alternative with wide open APIs where users can monetize their own data. If someone&#x27;s already working on this, I&#x27;d love to know.<p>I will officially never try to use any Facebook API in the future.

&gt; <i>Facebook continues to make real-time improvements to its platform to protect people&#x27;s data. We are making the following changes to maintain trust with people who use our products.</i><p>&quot;real-time* is probably not the best buzzword to use when trying to spin the rapid changes as a positive thing.

Much of this data can still be obtained through scraping without the API. Depending on official APIs for data collection has never been a great idea, as they are often governed by very low rate limits etc. The Facebook API has been useless for social apps since the 2014 changes anyway, so they have made something that was already useless even more useless. Hopefully everyone here saw the writing on the wall in 2014 and isn’t relying on the Facebook API for business processes or revenue in 2018.

A lot of the changes FB made were breaking changes that occured overnight a few weeks back that they didn&#x27;t warn any developers about... That&#x27;s a pretty good indication of how much they care about their developer ecosystem.<p>I wonder if this will hurt them more than they gambited for though. They&#x27;ve clearly thrown a lot of resources at the messenger API to encourage third parties to make bots. It also seems like WhatsApp&#x27;s strategy to monetize is increasly focused on businesses somehow integrating with the platform.<p>As a developer, though I know WhatsApp still operates as a separate entity it&#x27;s still ultimately owned by FB. And even though FB and WhatsApp still have incredibly dominant market share, stuff like this makes them look like very flaky foundations for third parties to build anything over... GDPR is going to hit FBs bottom line in europe and all their growth is coming from developing markets where user ARPUs are tiny... Long story short, I don&#x27;t think times are going to be sweetness and light for FB in the near term, and so this is a time where they&#x27;ll want as many friends as possible. But stunts like this won&#x27;t win them any friends in developers!

Why can&#x27;t we view the content without logging in?

This is why you should never cooperate with these people. Now the organization can&#x27;t push back and keep apis up without feeling scared.

Can anyone copy the content of the announcement into a comment so we aren&#x27;t forced to login to read it?

If your app depended on getting user data from facebook, you should have moved away from that anyway, they made so many pointless changes and limitations over the years that the fuss was not worth it. you can still use the feed dialogs for viral engagement.

Damn they do. Damn they don&#x27;t.

So now they are just going to directly sell this information?

Can&#x27;t blame them, it is a tricky business now.

&gt;You must log in to continue.<p>Can somebody post what the actual problem is?

For those who can&#x27;t&#x2F;won&#x27;t login to see this:<p>Facebook continues to make real-time improvements to its platform to protect people&#x27;s data. We are making the following changes to maintain trust with people who use our products. These changes are never easy, but by focusing our efforts, we can put stronger protections in place to combat potential abuse. Please find a quick summary of these changes below:<p>Facebook Login:<p>App review required to ask users to share checkins, likes, photos, videos, events, and groups<p>Following fields are now deprecated and will return empty data: relationship_status, religion, political, friendlists, education, work, about, website, interested_in<p>Following Open Graph permissions are also deprecated and will return empty data: books, fitness, games, music, news, video<p>Taggable friends and mutual friends APIs are now deprecated<p>Pages API:<p>App review required<p>Page conversations will receive a new thread identifier<p>Require a Page access token with a matching Page for specific endpoints: &#x2F;agencies, &#x2F;canvases, &#x2F;instagram_accounts, &#x2F;leadgen_forms, &#x2F;page_backed_instagram_accounts, &#x2F;promotable_posts, &#x2F;page&#x2F;userpermissions<p>Deprecated &#x2F;checkin_posts API and webhook<p>Remove social context elements: &#x2F;friends_who_like, &#x2F;friends_tagged_at, &#x2F;video_watch_friends, &#x2F;music_listen_friends<p>App review required to use the following edges: GET &#x2F;page&#x2F;events and GET &#x2F;me&#x2F;events<p>Events API:<p>App review required<p>Deprecated content edges on all events: &#x2F;feed, &#x2F;posts, &#x2F;comments, &#x2F;pictures, &#x2F;videos, &#x2F;live_videos, &#x2F;photos<p>Deprecated user edges on all events: &#x2F;attending, &#x2F;interested, &#x2F;declined, &#x2F;maybe, &#x2F;noreply<p>See User Node and Page API sections for details of &#x2F;events edges on these nodes<p>Groups API:<p>App review required; API use must meet a specific group admin need<p>Removed some fields returned by edges on groups: to, from, likes, reactions, name_tags, message_tags, with_tags, tags, admin_creator<p>Deprecated APIs that share data about people in groups, including &#x2F;members, &#x2F;admins, &#x2F;owner and a number of undocumented endpoints: &#x2F;member_requests, &#x2F;moderators, &#x2F;former_members, &#x2F;insights, &#x2F;links, &#x2F;tagged<p>Search API:<p>Deprecated Search API for pages, groups, events, and users<p>Games:<p>Updated Instant Games context_fetchPlayers API to limit users returned to those who have played in the specified context<p>Deprecated Scores API, Achievements API, &#x2F;taggable_friends, and &#x2F;invitable_friends<p>Deprecated &#x2F;{app-id}&#x2F;staticresources<p>App Insights API:<p>Removed age, gender and country information from the app_event metric<p>Instagram API Platform:<p>Instagram is accelerating the previously announced deprecation of the Instagram API Platform and has lowered rate limits<p>User Node<p>The following User node fields will no longer return information: about, education, friendlists, interested_in, political, relationship_status, religion, website, work.<p>GET &#x2F;user&#x2F;groups and GET &#x2F;me&#x2F;groups - This edge no longer returns any fields that contain User identifying information. This applies to all app Users, even app Admins querying their own User ID.<p>App review required to use the following edges: GET &#x2F;user&#x2F;events and GET &#x2F;me&#x2F;events (apps with user_events permission granted will still require re-review)

still doesnt show who visits your profile.