Facebook updates in Jomsocial activity Stream

rrader26,
Sorry for the non-response before. In the 4.1 release of JFBConnect, we did add the storage of the user's access token. This allows the site to fetch information about the user while they aren't online. However, Facebook is also changing the mechanism for how the offline tokens work and the 'old' way will no longer work in May. There is a 'new' way, which we actually like more, but it takes a little more to implement.

With all that tech stuff out of the way, the short of it is... right now, status updates aren't being pulled automatically using JFBConnect. We're investigating the 'real-time updates' features of Facebook. With that, the site is actually notified when a user changes their status (or avatar or other profile information) and then JFBConnect can use the access token (stored as mentioned above) to fetch that update and use it in their local profile.

We would love to have that ability in 4.2, planned to be released in April. It's in our task list for that release, but if it has to slip, it will definitely be in the 4.3 release. It's really a matter of how complex it is and also making sure we can implement it in an efficient enough way that can be used on really cheap hosts.. Facebook can pound away at your server letting you know that user's have updated their profile, and real cheap hosts may have issues with that. Performance is always important.

Hope that explains, and sorry again for the delay.

No, that would kill the server, actually. First off, it's not the recommended way for Facebook as they don't want you (and every other site on the planet) hitting their servers constantly just to check if any one of your user's have updated any piece of their profile. That's why the recommend the Real Time Updates feature and if you have a massive site that were to do the cron job method, you'd likely get your account suspended for so many requests.

On the hosting side, the cron job would get very slow as new users join the site. If you wanted to poll every hour (lets say) and you have 10 users, no problem. If you have 10,000 or more users, that's 10k requests (at least) per hour in addition to the processing of that. A slow host would die.. and 10,000 users isn't uncommon even on 'slow' sites.. if they've been a while a long time.

You could always stretch the cron to 24 hours or something (or split it into pieces 10% of users every hour, etc), but that just delays the inevitable wall. The Real Time Updates simplifies it by having Facebook tell you an update has happened, and you're notified within 5 minutes of the update. So, it works out to less 'work' for the server and you get updated quicker.

Hope that makes sense, but feel free to ask more.. this is something we've done some investigation on, but there's always alternatives we could have overlooked

Alex

We're hoping to get it into the 4.2 release in April. If the real-time updates or the new access token mechanism cause problems though, that will cause it to go into the 4.3 release, which would be a 2-3 months after 4.2.

Hope that helps,
Alex

rrader26,
Almost all features of 4.2 are complete, but now that means we have about 2 weeks of testing to go through. There is no fixed release date yet.. it's more of a 'when its ready' thing.. which will be the middle of the month at the earliest.

Unfortunately, we ran into some issues with the new authentication token scheme from Facebook, so the automatic pushed updates won't be in this release. However, we made good progress on it and have a course of action on how to proceed. The pushing of data from Facebook as well as a few other methods for automatically adding content (Likes, Comments, etc) to the users JomSocial stream is planned for the 4.3 release and I don't see any reason we'd miss now that we've tinkered with some of the features.

Sorry for the inconvenience,
Alex