Introduction to Facebook graph Application Program Interface( API).
API is a consolidation of protocols, set of routines and tools for developing software application. Ideally Facebook recognizes the relationship among the entities as a “Social Graph”. In Facebook, an entity can be a person, place, event or object that is relevant to a given system and an attribute is a property , characteristic of the entity. As shown in the diagram, Location is an entity and country, state, location id are the attributes. Based on the registered user profile, Facebook internally maintain a graph for that user. In that graph basically other users will be identified based on how they can be related to the former either by location, or by college, school etc. That is why we are always seeing “Add Friend” button to include other users in our own social circle. Facebook is displaying those non connected user which are either friend of our connected friends or somehow their profile data are similar with us.
The effective way to get data in or out of Facebook’s social graph is Facebook Graph API. It’s a low-level HTTP-based API that can be used to query data, post new stories, upload photos and a variety of other tasks that an application might need to do. As the Graph API is HTTP based, so it works with any language that has an HTTP library.
