What is the difference between a Facebook Page "Like" and an external URL "Like"? And will the "user_likes" permission scope give access to both?

Question

I'd like to pull a list of all Facebook "Likes" for a user, whether they are Facebook pages or external URLs.

Example:

If you "Like" the Facebook Platform, I know I can see it via the /me/likes API call.

However, if you like an external URL, I'm not sure how to pull that. Are both supposed to be pulled via the /me/likes call? Or is there another call to handle external likes?

Further, what about newsfeed / stream likes? For example, if I "Like" a photo, video, status or link that I see in my stream, is that accessible via the API? If so, how is this accessed?

Answer 1

Yes, user_likes will give you access to both.

You can access external likes as you wish through the Graph API endpoint /me/likes, as long as they're not articles. Objects with type "article" do not represent real-world objects and as such, we don't provide on a person's profile. We mention this (albeit obscurely) on the Open Graph documentation page: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/#types

So if you go to my fake movie object page at

http://fbsb.hoodlu.ms/so_7436857/video2.html

and click like, that will show up when you access your likes on https://graph.facebook.com/me/likes.

Try it using the Graph API explorer:

https://developers.facebook.com/tools/explorer/?method=GET&path=me%2Flikes

If you want the URLs that someone has liked, use this FQL query:

SELECT url FROM url_like WHERE user_id = me()

More information is available at https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/fql/url_like/.

If you want to access the likes from a post, photo, video, etc. you'll need to use the like and stream FQL tables. To just pull out the likes (of posts/photos/videos) for the current user:

SELECT user_id, object_id, post_id FROM like WHERE user_id=me()

From there, you would query the stream table for the post to get more information.

like table documentation: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/fql/like/.

stream table documentation: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/fql/stream/

Answer 2

Facebook now has two ways to read likes. If you would like to get the likes of an external URL you try this:

http://graph.facebook.com/me/og.likes/[ID_FACEBOOKOBJECT]

And if you wish get the likes from an internal Facebook page (fan page,profile,photo like) try this:

http://graph.facebook.com/me/likes/[ID_FACEBOOKOBJECT]

Checkout: https://developers.facebook.com/tools/explorer