Updating Stats On-The-Fly Using Facebook's Graph API Real-Time Updates

Question

I am looking to use Facebook's Graph API to implement real-time updates .

My web app will start out as a basic front-end that says [Page Name] has [x] likes. What I would like to accomplish is when a user likes the page, [x] will update accordingly and a message appears saying that the # of likes has increased. I have already implemented getting the number of likes from a page.

Ideally, I would like the update to take place when the POST from Facebook to my callback URL is made. A suggestion I received was to set up a listener for the callback, then once Facebook makes a POST to my callback URL, the listener will update data accordingly and interact with the front-end to update [x] 's value.

Is this possible? If so, how would I go about implementing such? I am trying to avoid a polling technique as, in a large-scale context, would constantly use resources.

Answer 1

According to the documentation for Real-Time updates, you can subscribe to likes by the users who has authorized your app. Not to anyone who likes a page. The page can get notified of only one thing: " For page, you will get updates about the pages which have added your application as a tab. ". So this API is not going to have that ability.

My suggestion would be to use a polling technique to get your page's number of likes using FQL via the JS SDK.

SELECT fan_count FROM page where page_id = {your page}