Mike Lamoureux's Blog

I am in the process of adding another source of data to my Semantic Web Dashboard.  I want to chart my number of friends via Social Media over time.  I started with Facebook - but Facebook doesn’t give me access to my historical friends count, only the current count today.  So, I’m writing a app that will record the number of friends I have on a daily basis.  I plan to expand it down the road to include number of postings and other things.  This will mean that any chart I create will have limited data initially.  I didn’t get to actually creating the chart yet, it took me long enough to figure out Facebook’s Graph API and to get that working properly (did I mention that I hate JSON?).

Here is the source to my PHP script that grabs my friend count:

<?php 

//require_once(“facebook-php-sdk-master/src/facebook.php”);

    $user_id = “7412441”;

$app_id = “REMOVED”;

$app_secret = “REMOVED”;

$my_url = “REMOVED”;

$app_token_url = “https://graph.facebook.com/oauth/access_token?”

. “client_id=” . $app_id

. “&client_secret=” . $app_secret 

. “&grant_type=client_credentials”;

 

$response = file_get_contents($app_token_url);

$params = null;

    parse_str($response, $params);

$graph_url = “https://graph.facebook.com/app?access_token=” 

        . $params[‘access_token’];

    //$app_details = json_decode(file_get_contents($graph_url), true);

    //$query_url = “https://graph.facebook.com//fql?q=SELECT+friend_count+FROM+user+WHERE+uid=” . $user_id . “&access_token=” . $params[‘access_token’];

$query_url = “https://graph.facebook.com/$user_id?fields=friends&access_token=” . $params[‘access_token’];

    $rawdata = file_get_contents($query_url);

    //echo $rawdata;

$friends = json_decode($rawdata, true);

$friends_count = count($friends[‘friends’][‘data’]);

echo $friends_count;

// Write to RDF, not complete yet.

$RDFData = “data.ttl”;

$fh = fopen($RDFData, ‘a’);

$stringData = “”;

?>