9

I would like to get friends of friends via an API call and when I try to do it, I get the following exception,

    {
   "error": {
      "type": "OAuthException",
      "message": "(#604) Can't lookup all friends of .... Can only lookup for the logged in user (...), or friends of the logged in user with the appropriate permission"
   }
}

The URL I am trying to access is,

https://graph.facebook.com/friend_id/friends?access_token=access_token

I am getting extended permissions which is as follows,

<fb:login-button perms="user_likes,friends_likes"></fb:login-button>

Could any one please let me know what's going wrong here? Or does it mean I can never get access to friends of friends?

Somnath Muluk
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Abhishek
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6 Answers6

6

Currently, there is no extended permission that allows you to view a user's friends of friends. The "*_likes" permissions just show you the Facebook pages that the users have Liked.

It might be possible for you to iteratively fetch and cache the friends of each of the user's friends, one by one, but without access tokens for each friend, you'll only be able to fetch public data.

Raphomet
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3

I got friends of friends(limited). I had same problem. Though it is very late for answering question, it will help somebody. That's why answering this question.

We can get friends of friends those are app users. $fb_id= user id whose friends of friends required.

$query="SELECT uid, name, work_history FROM user WHERE uid IN (SELECT uid2 FROM friend WHERE uid1 IN (SELECT uid FROM user WHERE uid IN (SELECT uid2 FROM friend WHERE uid1 = $fb_id ) and is_app_user=1) )"; $user_info=$facebook->api(array('method'=>'fql.query', 'query'=>$query));

@Olie:

You are fetching your friends of your friend through application. So you would need permission from your friend whose friends you want. i.e. Your friend should be using that application and accepted those permission while allowing accessing information. Otherwise you wont be able to friends of your friend. I have tested this query. And it works successfully. 

"message": "(#604) Can't lookup all friends of .... Can only lookup for the logged in user (...), or friends of the logged in user with the appropriate permission"

This message explains well. Read carefully.

Hope you understand solution criteria.

Somnath Muluk
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  • I'm not quite following this. Say I list my friends, and they contain fbID = 17, 24, 319 and 4027. Now I would like to get a list of the friends of fbID=319 (one of my friends.) This works on the FB website, but I'm not getting it to work using your query. Am I misunderstanding you? – Olie Aug 28 '12 at 22:55
1

You cannot get friends of friends, it is not allowed due to privacy concerns.

A workaround we have done before is to save all users friends to oure own database. That way we could cross-reference all the different users friend-list's and at least get friends of friends who have used the application we made.

Important note, such a table would quickly grow quite seizable depending on the amount of users you get.

Count on each user having about 250-300 friends on average, so if you opt for such a solution make sure to optimize your database for it, and then it should work just great.

Vargr
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0

Got same problem, had to use old REST API to get at least mutual friends, see http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/rest/friends.getMutualFriends/

Artjom Kurapov
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-1

You can get the friends of the current user through a Graph API call to me/friends. You will need any valid access_token, no special extended permissions, just the Basic one. There is one caveat, that user must allow you to see their friend list. So in the Privacy Settings > Connecting on Facebook there is a "See your friend list" setting. If the user has chosen a custom setting and selected say "Only Me" you will get this error.

Similarly, if the current user allows others to see their friend list, but one of the friends shuts this down due to privacy concerns then you will not be able to see any data and will get that error.

I was able to verify the scenarios I have described.

C Abernathy
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  • I don't know why this answer is being voted down. It's the right answer. The best scenarios are mutual friends, shown here: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/rest/friends.getMutualFriends/. Or using the graph here: http://developers.facebook.com/tools/explorer/?method=GET&path=me%2Fmutualfriends%2F1207059 – Joey Schluchter Jan 26 '12 at 17:14
-3

Unfortunately, I can't ask your answer specifically since I don't have experience with the FB API. However, I believe that FB allows users to hide who their friends are. If they have this set, then perhaps you won't be able to access their friends at all. I'd try to modify your code to first check what the permissions of a given user are and only then accessing their friends list if you have access to it. A bit of speculation here, though.

jlv
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  • Well, I also tried to create two profiles with all access to friends and test it. DOes not seem to work :( – Abhishek Sep 29 '10 at 06:39