Facebook Open Graph Follows

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

How to use the third_party_id?

This could have been explained better by Facebook. I think it works like this:

Lets say William followed Claudette in your app and that your app successfully published a follow action on facebook. Whether you provide Claudette's third_party_id or not, a story that William followed Claudette, will get published on William's News Feed.

However if Claudette's third_party_id is provided, then William will start getting stories about ALL of Claudette's actions published by your app. Now, thats pretty cool. But of course to do this, Facebook needs to know "who Claudette is" which is what third_party_id does.

To summarize, by not providing third_party_id the follow action gets shared on William's news feed and potentially to William's friends. But thats a one time thing. By providing the third_party_id you are extending the virality and ensuring a constant flow from Claudette to William for actions Claudette does on your app.

Answer 2

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.