Authenticating if a Facebook account exists - don't want to go through FB login

Question

Hi,

I'd like to figure out a way to authenticate a facebook account on a form, without having to go into facebook login and whatnot.

So my question, is there anyway to check, I was thinking maybe the markup with regex, where I could check to see if a facebook count exists, and if so do something.

Thanks for the suggestions.

Answer 1

You can use the Graph API to check if an object for said user exists. (e.g., https://graph.facebook.com/btaylor).

From the reference page:

Alternatively, people and pages with usernames can be fetched using their username as an ID. Since "platform" is the username for the page above, https://graph.facebook.com/platform will return what you expect. All responses are JSON objects.

...though I'm not really sure how the relation username <-> ID is established. The preferred access is through ID: https://graph.facebook.com/220439

Hope this helps.