Facebook API - Wall posts and comments counts by day

Question

So my goal was seemingly simple get the number of wall posts for the day. I was using the graph API insights/page_wall_posts until I realized the counts were not correct. Is there a better stat to use? I did see in the FQL documentation that page_wall_post is depreciated but it failed to say if it was replaced with something else.

My questions are:

1. How can I get the count of all wall posts for a day?
2. Similarly how can I get total comments on the wall for the day?

I have code that parses the results, but when I was testing yesterday using the graph explorer I saw that the data coming back was no where close to the actually activity on Facebook.

Answer 1

So the answer to my question is the next best way to get this data is by using:

insights/page_stories_by_story_type . It will return something like:

"data": [
{
  "id": "<THE ID>/insights/page_stories_by_story_type/day", 
  "name": "page_stories_by_story_type", 
  "period": "day", 
  "values": [
    {
      "value": {
        "fan": 10, 
        "page post": 8, 
        "user post": 3, 
        "checkin": 1
      }, 
      "end_time": "2012-02-05T08:00:00+0000"
    }, 

The page_post value will include post+comments. Which is the best I could find using insight data.

Answer 2

I've seen some inconsistencies as well between data available to the Graph and what is actually seen via the Facebook UI.

However, if you can live with relying on the results from the Graph API, you do have some ways of getting the information you're after. If it involved pagination of results, you may be disappointed in the results.

You can run FQL thru the graph API (and even from the Graph API Explorer). Try

fql?q=SELECT post_id, comments, message FROM stream WHERE source_id=me() AND created_time > 1326064184 AND created_time < 1326634407

From this query you get the stream items for the user as well as the comments object for each of those posts.

If you are looking to pull comments counts for a time period on the user's posts, then you can use: fql?q=SELECT object_id, text, time FROM comment WHERE post_id IN (SELECT post_id FROM stream WHERE source_id=me()) AND time > 1326064184 AND time < 1326634407