What is the difference between feed, posts and statuses in Facebook Graph API?

Question

I'm trying to write a program that retreives a given user's "statuses" (and by statuses I mean the things he posted himself, anything he wrote as I'm mostly interested in textual statuses)

I cannot figure out the difference from the documentation here https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/user/ so I don't know which connection type to use; feed, posts or statuses

(Another thing I noticed is that statuses requires an access_token while the other 2 require the access_token only for non public stuff)

Thanks

Answer 1

This is documented on the User object of the Graph api. And, as of the Graph API v2.6, there is basically one main endpoint from which you get posts from a user.

• /{user-id}/feed includes all the things that a user might see on their own profile feed; this includes, e.g., shared links, checkins, photos and status updates. This also includes posts made by friends on the user's profile.

  The following endpoints return subsets of the above:

  • /{user-id}/posts returns the posts created by the user (on their own profile or the profile of a friend), and it may include any kind of content such as shared links, checkins, photos and status updates.

  • /{user-id}/tagged returns the posts created by friends and shared on the users's profile.

By default each returned post only includes the story field with a textual description of the post. But you can use the ?fields=... parameter to request as many Post fields as you want.

You'll need the user_posts permission for any of these to work.

The following endpoints are deprecated:

• /{user-id}/statuses returns only status updates posted by the user on their own profile. [removed after Graph API v2.3]

• /{user-id}/home returns a stream of all the posts created by the user and their friends, i.e. what you usually find on the “News Feed” of Facebook. [removed after Graph API v2.3]

Answer 2

I've found one more difference between /statuses and /posts. /statuses are just text statuses (it doesn't include shared links)