How to get Facebook subscriber count + friend count

Question

Until few weeks ago I was able to get subscriber count & friend count for personal accounts in Facebook. Here's the code I used:

$userid = '543766397';
$url = file_get_contents('http://api.facebook.com/method/fql.query?format=json&query=select+subscriber_count,+friend_count+from+user+where+uid%3D'.$userid);
$decode = json_decode($url);  

$fb['subscriber_count'] = $decode[0]->subscriber_count;
$fb['friend_count'] = $decode[0]->friend_count;

Facebook has made changes to their service and the code above isn't working any more. I've tried to find solution this problem for several days but it seems that either I don't know how to find the answer or I'm alone with my problem. I know that FQL queries are legacy way of doing things and most likely feature is deprecated but I haven't found any working solution.

Any assistance would be highly appreciated!

Answer 1

First of all, the subscriber edge is deprecated since Graph API v2.0. You're calling the also deprecated REST API. You can also no longer get the friend count without having a User Access Token containing the user_friends permission.

Once you have that, you can call /me/friends to receive the total_count:

{
  "data": [], 
  "paging": {
    "next": "https://graph.facebook.com/v2.3/me/friends?limit=25&offset=25&__after_id=enc_AdAZ"
  }, 
  "summary": {
    "total_count": 123
  }
}

See

• https://developers.facebook.com/docs/apps/changelog#v2_0

• /me/subscribers and /me/subscribedto have been removed.

• Friend list is no longer part of the default permission set and has its own permission: Asking for access to a person's friend list is now a separate permission that your app must request. The new permission is called user_friends.