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CyanPrime
CyanPrime

Reputation: 5193

Display facebook userpage via scraping, or FB API?

So I'm trying to find a way to ether scrape a Facebook user page's html (Hoping it updates in real time) or just display it using the Facebook API. My end result will be a themed feed of a users Facebook home page. I don't want to radically change the theme, or re-code their theme from scratch, I just wanna change the color, maybe add a cool background image on it, and offer it as a sort of easy way to get a Facebook theme (Just visit my site, and select one from a drop-down menu).

Now, I'm only interested in legal ways to do this, as I don't want to be sued.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 141

Answers (2)

C3roe
C3roe

Reputation: 96383

Well, if you want it “legal”, then scraping should be out of the question straight away.

Doing it via their API … well, that does not offer enough benefits making up for the drawbacks IMHO, from a user perspective. It would be a very “static” view – whereas on Facebook itself I can easily interact with everything, post, comment, etc.

And copying to much of the Facebook “look & feel” might get you in conflict with their Branding guidelines very quickly.

And, last but not least, if you where to implement it as a user JavaScript or browser extension, you’d collide with the first example here, “Profile Takeover”, https://developers.facebook.com/docs/guides/policy/examples_and_explanations/Prohibited_Functionality/

I’d say: Not really worth it. Not worth the effort, not worth the (potential) trouble.

Upvotes: 1

Corstian Boerman
Corstian Boerman

Reputation: 848

If I was you I should use the Facebook API because scraping webpages is very work intensive. Although its interesting to scrape the login page to show your own interface. But on the other side, this makes it very easy to do something malicious with the login.

Use the Facebook API whenever possible, if you want to add functions that are not available in the Facebook API, start thinking about scraping.

Upvotes: 1

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