 <p>Check out Open Graph- Twitter &amp; Facebook both use this architecture to retrieve "stories" posted by users. It's a version of the semantic web idea. <a href="https://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/" rel="nofollow">https://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/</a> The days of SQL calls are over (thank god). FQL- the Facebook Query Language still works, but is largely being deprecated. It's not SQL but a version of a query language against the graph (was databases).</p>