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I am building an in-house application which would accumulate the information from several social networks at once. Possibly, the URL of the application will not be known or it will not be allowed anywhere outside localhost.

One of the information pieces I will be accumulating is FQL insights table information: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/fql/insights/ . As you may notice, this information is private, so I just cannot fetch it anonymously.

The application itself is written in a "configure once and use forever" fashion, and possibly the person using the application will not be allowed to the Facebook login credentials at all.

My problem is the Facebook login. As I understand the login with "forever access" is now deprecated and Facebook does not allow API access the same way as Twitter does (creating the forever lasting key and forgetting about it). Question is:

  • Is there any way to overcome the fact that I need to ask the person for permissions every time I would like to fetch them? What can be the longest period between asking?

My current thoughts about it are:

  • Creating a dummy user for the 'manager' and giving him read-only access to FB pages, therefore enabling him to log in to the account. Then asking him for the permissions every (n) hours when I need them.
  • Automatic log in to the FB account given that we have the login/password for the account and obtaining the API key myself.

Which is doable? Did anyone have any experience in doing this kind of things?

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up vote 1 down vote accepted
What can be the longest period between asking?

You can use Long-lived user access_token which is valid for 60 days.Use below FB call to get extended access token:


You can check more details here:


One more point which is worth to note here: When a user change his password, deauthorizes an app their OAuth token get expired.

Hope this help !

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"Our platform will only extend the expiration time once per day, so even if a user revists your site multiple times a day, the token will be extended the first time requested." As I understand, you have used the API before. Does this actually mean I will be able to extend the token each day forever? This is something I was thinking before, but thanks for the answer :) I guess there is no other way to do this. –  Andrey Cizov Oct 17 '12 at 10:06
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