How far back in time can you go with the Facebook API?

With the Facebook 开发者_运维技巧API are only recent things (wall posts, friends status updates etc) obtainable or is everything ever associated with the user's account obtainable?

That's a tricky question.

First nowhere in the official documentation says how many items you can get from Graph API nor FQL. Not only this. Also when trying to do normal recently querys you may find out that not every result is returnes. Nor from the Graph API, FQL, not even from the FQL Test Console.

All this is because serious bugs in the Facebook Platform.

On october 15 Facebook said in its blog

We have received a great deal of feedback recently about things we should do to improve Facebook Platform. The themes are clear: “fix the bugs,” “update the documentation,” “talk to us more,” and “make things more reliable.” We are listening, and this post outlines some of the things we are doing to address your concerns.

This means that they are now fixing the bugs that has been accumulated on many months in Facebook Bug Tracker.

One of the open Bugs in there says:

When using a FQL Query or utilizing the new Graph API to grab posts on a users stream, not all posts are returned.

From what I can see, the system will grab the latest posts from within the last month, and then becomes extremely spotty after that. I am able to grab posts from myself up to 4/24/2010, at which point every single wall post I have posted seems to disappear.

Many other developers have states the same thing under the comments of this Bug.

On 2010-09-27 Jeff Bowen (Developer from facebook) said the following

Hi all, we still need to add this to the documentation but the stream table is limited the last 30 days or 50 posts, whichever is greater. Sorry this wasn't previously published.

This have made many people upset since they assumed you could get everything from the Graph API.

Anyway this is for multiple results. If you want a single result apperently (from the commnets in thts bug) You could go as far as June 15 2009

Personally, I haven't tested yet again so I don't know if this actully works the way they say. Facebook Graph API is in constant change. It has been incomplete and buggy since the begining. But now Facebook says they are working on that.

I recommend every facebook developer to sign up for the Facebook Platform bug tracking system since there is a lot of not official things about facebook, that will impact your applications.

I'll keep an eye on there to see if more is said on this topic and update this answer if needed