Friday 23 May 2014

Say Thanks to birthday wishes on Facebook automatically

One of the main reasons why people turn into computer geeks is because they are lazy :P Yesterday was my birthday. Again, thanks for all the wishes :) However I was lazy to manually thank each and every post on my Facebook wall. So I wrote a simple python script using Facebook graph API to say thanks to each of them. I didn't stop there. I am aware that many people think that thanking people manually is something that has always been very tiring. So I searched for all the simpler alternatives available to do this task and found that there was a Facebook app called "Say Thank You". It is simple and neat. However, it requires people to give access to post, like, get friend list..etc. Well, that is a mini privacy invasion :P. So it is a not a good alternative. Also in future Facebook might think that it is doing something against their policies..blah blah blah and bring it down. So not a permanent solution either.
Hence I decided to rewrite the script I had written in python to javascript to make it accessible online. Well, here it is:

http://alseambusher.github.io/say-thanks/

For this you will need to get the access token. Getting access token is simple:

  • Go to developers.facebook.com.
  • Under Tools in the menu, go to Graph explorer.
  • Click on Get Access Token if access token isn't there already.

Note that as this runs completely on the client side, users can safely use it without giving access to anybody (Although it requires you to give access token, it is not stored anywhere. See source ). And access tokens expire after sometime.


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