Using the Facebook API compared with the Twitter API

I thought it would be useful to contrast facebook's api with twitter's, when it came to accessing user information. I am not sure about facebook's API, so I'm trying to clarify and compare the following:

1) With twitter, you can scrape data about most people by using an "application" oauth token/secret. Simple and free apps can do twittermining with there own oauth token/secret, that has no relation to a user.

Is this approach possible in facebook?

2) With twitter, an oauth credential has several requests which it can be used to "power". In facebook, can we reuse and recycle Oauth tokens for different requests? Or are they specific to users? This relates to question (1), since I开发者_如何转开发'm not quite clear on whether the graph API allows anonymous requests.

In general, Facebook is less open than Twitter when it comes to sharing information. Privacy is more of a concern because people share more personal data on Facebook.

1. Yes, you can use facebook's APIs to "scrape" data about people. What and how much data you can scrape depends on their privacy settings, privileges they have granted your app, etc. While the ethics are somewhat questionable and it is probably against facebook's terms of use, it is technically possible to create an account and use an OAuth token to gather data about people with it (although the amount of data you can gather, again, depends on their privacy settings).

2. OAuth tokens are user-specific. When a user logs in and authorizes your app to access their account, you're given a token you can use to access their account. You can make anonymous Graph API calls, as not every call requires an access token. However, data about users is generally limited to what's available on facebook when you're not signed in when making "anonymous" requests with no access token.

Facebook's Developer documentation pretty well covers what is available. It may be confusing or unclear at times, so I've found the best way to figure out what's possible and what's not is to write a little app and try it.