Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Searching Facebook Posts Facebook API F8

Got back from the facebook conference last week, and let it settle in a little.
Of all the cool things I learned. Being able to search through and read public posts has to be the most valuable and scary thing that came out of it.
Facebook has now made it very easy to search through all posts made between friends unless the user has specifically set it to private. Now very few people have taken that precaution, but they still believe their posts can only be read by people they have accepted as their friends - well, sorry, but we all have access to your dirty little secrets.
Here is a search of facebook posts for "oops sex" It is easy to see that these people have no clue you are able to read their text and can see their full name right next to it.
http://graph.facebook.com/search?q=opps%20sex&type=post

Then if we want we can pull out a certain name and see everything that they have posted and we can see their friends who they meant to sent that information by using the other API calls here:
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/api

If you don't want others reading your posts you better set your profile to private!
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Now for Internet marketers like myself this has a lot of good uses.
Using a scraper like mozenda you could ping this search with many terms and learn what people are saying about your brand while building a social graph of this information. You could also find hot sales leads here too, but be careful how you approach them. You could freak people out.

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

photos from f8


Here is my first photo from the 2010 f8
I think I saw sean parker and mark.
More to come from f8