introducing-graph-api-v26

The Graph API is the backbone of our developer platform, powering Facebook-integrated experiences around the world and serving an average of 890 billion API requests per day. In the latest version of the Graph API (v2.6), we're introducing new and updated features that enable you to build even richer app experiences across Messenger, Facebook Live, Reactions, Video, Rights Manager, Facebook Ads, and Sharing for devices.

Messenger Platform

Messenger is redefining everyday communication with 900 million monthly active users.The Send and Receive API lets you build instant, interactive bot experiences for Messenger - for example, bots could send daily weather updates, be a shopping concierge, or power live customer service for businesses. You can start building right away. To ensure the best experience for people, we are opening up the Messenger platform slowly and bots will need to go through an approval process. You can learn more here.

Live API

We're introducing the Live API, which enables developers to build the next generation of interactive, live video apps and devices. The Live API lets you build apps and services that publish directly to Facebook Live. You can go beyond mobile device cameras and bring in video from professional cameras and programmatic sources such as games or screencasts. You can enroll to use the Live API, and read the documentation referenced here and here for more details.

Reactions API

Every day people come to Facebook to discover and share; these stories can be happy, sad, funny or thought-provoking. We built Reactions to give people a way to express how they feel about stories in News Feed. We're launching a set of read-only APIs for you to request Reactions on a post. With 'manage_pages' permission for a Page management app, or 'user_posts' permission for a consumer-facing app, you can now you can read info about Reactions including the total number of reactions, the number of each type of reaction (sad, happy, etc), and people who reacted.

Video API

500 million people watch videos on Facebook each day. We are adding features to the Video API to help you manage and customize your videos and adding new metrics to Video Insights to help you optimize your content.

The Video API now includes a video’s current broadcast state in a new field called ‘live_status’. Pages can use Crossposted Videos to create new posts from existing videos without the need to upload the video again. Finally, Pages can also grant permission for other Pages associated with the same business reuse videos in posts.

Video Insights helps you optimize your video content by understanding how people engage with it on Facebook. It now provides new metrics including: lifetime minutes watched, daily view count, and minutes watched for each video. You can also see sound on/off breakdowns, 10-second metrics for video views, and aggregated insights for a video, including a breakdown of metrics if a video was crossposted in multiple posts. More information in the Insights documentation here.

Rights Manager API

The Rights Manager API enables publishers to claim copyright ownership for videos and to manage copyright matching rules with two new endpoints: the copyright rule endpoint and copyright endpoint. To use this API, enroll your page to the Rights Manager Tool.

Marketing API

We are now accepting beta testers for the new Facebook Ads Java SDK which provides an easy interface and abstraction between your Java application and Facebook's Marketing API - GitHub repo here. We're also launching Autogen versions of the Java, Python, and PHP SDKs so that you can receive updated versions of the SDKs quickly and enable feature parity among all of our SDKs.

Sharing for Devices API

Devices including TVs, set-top boxes, digital photo frames, and other internet of Things devices can now use the Share dialog. The Sharing for Devices API lets people explicitly share content from devices to Facebook using a new Graph API. Devices submit a link to share to the API which returns a short code to show to people. After entering the code on their mobile device, people are redirected to the web Share dialog to complete the share. Learn more in the documentation.

For a complete list of changes in Graph API v2.6, see the changelog.

We are excited to see what you build with these new APIs, and you can expect the next version of the Graph API to be announced this summer.