Real-time Update API

Facebook recently updated the Graph API for developers. It helps developers to keep the users information up to date, which helps the application to increase its reliability and dependability. Also the loading time of the application decreases by a margin which enhances the user experience with your application.

You just need to enable your application and subscribe to the changes in data. Previously your application continuously tries to access Facebook’s servers, but with the Real-time update API your application would be able to cache the user’s data and receive updated afterwards. Your application would receive notifications whenever data changes are made. With Real-time update API your application will have the ability to receive certain type of updates (the list is provided below).

Type of Updates:

You are able to subscribe for the following updates:

User Receive notifications about specific user’s information and connections.
Page Receive notifications when the page (where the application is installed) change its public properties.
Permissions Receive notifications when a user changes his / her permissions settings for your application.
Receive notifications for Facebook Payments.
Payment Subscriptions- Receive notifications relates to Facebook payment subscriptions.
Errors Receive notifications about the errors.

The important thing to note here is that you cannot subscribe to updates for all properties and connections of the user. The connections that you are able to subscribe includes Feeds, Activities, Music, Friends, Interests, Movies, Likes, Books, Television, Location, Events, and Check-ins.

For pages you can subscribe to changes such as Name, Category, and Picture.

Facebook’s real-time update API is a sigh of relief for the developers, as it decreases the loading time and updates the user’s data. Now you can relax and let your worries shift to the newly introduced API for real-time updates. Moreover, if a change notification is not through to your server successfully, Facebook will re-send the notification immediately. This will happen till 24 hours, off course the time duration of the subsequent notifications will decrease.

Conclusion

According to our expertise and experience, we think this is a good addition in APIs by Facebook. It really helps the developers and also the application owners, as the data used in the application is updated whenever a change is made to the particular user attributes.