Incorporating MySpace/Bebo/Facebook into website

Freakish_05 · 29 Mar 2007 at 21:14

Good evening!

I'm trying to make my better half a website to, shall we say 'collate' her collection of other 'websites' i.e. MySpace/Bebo/Facebook...the list goes on.
One of the prerequisits of me making the website is incorporating at least the networking sections of each of these websites. If that makes sense.

In laymans terms I need to be able to read, display and update information on the myspace etc websites.

Any ideas or resources that might help me achieve this?

Ta muchly

Una · 29 Mar 2007 at 21:36

Facebook have a developer API - http://developers.facebook.com/

No idea about the other sites.

Augmented · 29 Mar 2007 at 21:38

Don't know how 'laymans terms' you need it. Are you at all proficient with any scripting language like PHP?

Facebook certainly has an API available (http://developers.facebook.com) - it's a typical webservice returning all the data in XML format which you can do with as you wish.

There's a test console you can use to play around with the different types of data you can retrieve. Also client libraries available, which means all the heavy code is already written for you - sample code here: http://developers.facebook.com/documentation.php?v=1.0

I've not actually used it properly myself, but it looks pretty good, and you'll definitely be able to retrieve the friends lists data.

Myspace. It's so poorly designed that I doubt it will ever have an open API. You're likely going to have to scrape the data i.e. grab the HTML file and extract the relevant info with a script.

No idea about Bebo.

huppy · 30 Mar 2007 at 00:12

Bebo will be much the same as myspace, i have no doubts.

If you can spend the time doing this i think it would be quite a great thing - and the rewards would probably be well worth it, provided its reliable. I don't doubt it would be a hell of a lot of work though, and potentially the type of work where one minor change on myspace/bebo would completely cause any page you put together to be completely useless.

Though I do wish you luck! and if you manage it, and there's a paypal donate link, i would certainly donate.