Upgrading Facebook Pages to use Facebook API Version 2.3

#1

As version 1.0 of Facebook’s API is being deprecated on April 30th, 2015, we will be upgrading our Facebook Pages Managed Sources to use version 2.3 of Facebook’s API before this date. Due to this change in API version, you may notice some differences in how your Facebook Pages Managed Sources work:

As of Facebook API version 2.0, Facebook have introduced App-scoped user IDs. With app-scoped IDs, the ID for a given user will be different between apps, however Facebook have reported that this change should be backward compatible with API version 1.0, so you will only notice this change when creating new Facebook Pages Managed Sources.
This has implications for any Facebook Pages Managed Source that has multiple tokens created from different Apps:

  • The source might return different user IDs for different comments made by the same person.
  • The source might return duplicate Likes interactions as Likes can only be distinguished by the user ID of their author.

Apart from the problem of duplicate Likes, this makes filtering by user ID unreliable and anyone using multiple access tokens on a single source originating from a different App needs to be aware of this. The same applies for filtering across sources with tokens from different Apps. Two tokens are from a different App if:

  • They are App tokens
  • They are user tokens created against a different App. Tokens created via the DataSift UI are always from a single App; “DataSift Pages”
Release Notes thru April 28th, 2015
#2

The statement about the app-scoped ids for filtering and running queries is understood, however I am not clear about the comment stating that a source could still return duplicate likes.

My understanding is that the managed source returns all interactions (as much as it can) for events that are selected (likes, pagelikes, comments and so on) as they occur.
This is regardless of the app-scoped id right?

I am reading this as that if I am just doing a direct capture of all activity on a FB managed page by source (without a filter on any item) that there is a chance that duplicate interactions of type “like” could occur in the output? Is that correct? (Or are you just referring to the fact that if you are doing a group by on the now app-scoped user id that as there is no way to identify these users individually, there could be a double count of a user like)

#3

Your existing sources should not be affected by these changes; Facebook have suggested that these changes to the API are backward compatible with API version 1.0 so you will only notice differences when creating new sources.

Duplicate Likes can be returned in a case where you are using tokens generated by two different apps, and you query the same Facebook resource.
For example, let’s say we have a Managed Source using two tokens (each generated by a different app), and it is monitoring one resource (Page), which has a single post, with a single Like. We will pull that Post back once, but the Like will be pulled back twice; once by each token as the ID of the user who created the Like will appear differently to each token (due to the app-scoped user IDs). We do de-duplicate Likes interactions internally based on user ID, but as this Like will appear to be created by two users, we will pull it back and deliver it twice.

One way to prevent receiving duplicate Like interactions will be to create multiple smaller Managed Sources, each with a single token monitoring a smaller number of resources, rather than creating one large source with multiple tokens.

#4

We ran to a very interesting issue that we also filed a support ticket. I think it has something to do with the update as we started to lose some data after that: Some Facebook pages are not working in Managed Sources web UI and not gathering all the data. Also, it seems that you can’t access these pages without loggin in to the Facebook. Also graph.facebook.com gives an error with these pages.

However, it’s interesting that you can find the pages from Facebook Page Managed Source UI, but the error pops up when you try to save the source. It just fails to save it, without any given reason.

Could it be so that These pages are not accessible anymore in future via FB page suorce Or is this just a bug in Datasift system? At least, they are not accessible now.

You can test this with almost any betting/lottery/gambling page.