Facebook’s Query APIs

As you’ve probably heard, the Facebook developer ecosystem is complex, continually evolving,^[57] and filled with many twists and turns involving the most sophisticated privacy controls the Web has ever seen. In addition to sporting a standard battery of REST APIs and a more advanced SQL-like language for querying data in a manner similar to SQL called Facebook Query Language (FQL), Facebook unveiled the Graph API and the Open Graph protocol (OGP) in April 2010 at the F8 conference. In short, OGP is a mechanism that enables you to make any web page an object in a rich social graph by injecting some RDFa (more on this in a moment) metadata into the page, and the Graph API is a simple and intuitive mechanism for querying the graph. Each object has a particular type. At the time of this writing, the Graph API supports the following types of objects, as described in the Graph API Reference: