spring social console application with main method

[jack.white]

habuma, I'm not sure that I agree with your assessment that Facebook frowns on a profile tied to a company -- look at the CNN page on Facebook (there are tons of other companies as well, ESPN, NFL, Marvel, Google, etc.), they have their own page where they push content to. Why can't other companies who provide content do the same thing? That's what I am trying to set up. In a nutshell, I have content (stories) stored in my application and I'd like for a content administrator to be able to selectively post that content to one of their pages (since companies can have multiple interest-related pages). The content from the application could be selectively posted to those pages associated with the company's account. It would be nice to have a Spring Social sample whereby you have an application that establishes a connection to their account, then can post that content to a page. The application should not require the end-user to connect to Facebook with their credentials in a session, rather the application would establish that connection and the connections would be stored as singletons to be used whenever posting content. Actually, you would want the application to also allow for the administrator to manage and update the OAuth token and store the updated credentials in a database. Is there any example of how this can be done using Spring Social?

[habuma]

See https://www.facebook.com/help/175644189234902/. Specifically the text under "Why should I convert my personal account to a Facebook Page?":

Since personal accounts are meant for individual people, they aren't suited to meet your business needs.
Pages offer more robust features for organizations, businesses, brands and organizations.

...and...

Maintaining a personal account for anything other than an individual person is a violation of Facebook's Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. If you don’t convert your noncompliant account to a Page, you risk permanently losing access to the account and all of its content.

So, yeah...I do think Facebook frowns on that.

On the surface, the CNN page looks just like any other profile page...but it's not. It's a company page on Facebook, which was setup by someone who is a Facebook user (and is likely employed by CNN). From a visitor's point of view, the distinction is trivial. But internally, a company profile page is a very different thing than a user profile page. That's all I was saying: That you shouldn't use a *user* profile page to represent a company. Instead you should setup a company profile page.

You do that by logging into Facebook and then going to https://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php. From there you can create all kinds of pages, including one that represents your company. This is fairly basic Facebook usage--I've done it myself for some special interest pages such as https://www.facebook.com/SpringSocial and https://www.facebook.com/springinaction (although I've not done much with those).

When you post to your *user* profile page, you simply provide a user access token and you post to /me/feed. But when you post to any other kind of page (such as a company page), the client must obtain a second access token for the user; one that allows that user to post to that page. And that user must have been granted authority to do so. But when they post, they post on behalf of the company/organization/etc not on their own behalf. There are currently no examples of such interaction, but I suppose it would be useful.

Again, you're perfectly welcome to try to setup a *user* profile and have it represent a company. You might get away with it. But I caution you, because Facebook often reviews those kinds of profiles and disables them if they feel they violate their usage rules.

Besides, the approach I outlined above is better because it pushes much of the security for that brand page to be handled by Facebook. You can have one or more admins allowed to post to the page and easily revoke that permission for any given user without upsetting the permission for any other users.

[jack.white]

I understand what you're saying, I'm sure you know this much better than I, still I believe that is a subtle distinction. In reality (very likely), the "user" who maintains the CNN pages (because there are multiple domain specific pages in addition to the main CNN page) is a pseudo-individual. I might be wrong, but it would seem unlikely that companies such as CNN would have their pages owned, in essence, by an employee who could leave. Even if they have multiple administrators who could continue posting on their behalf, what's to stop the owner from hijacking the CNN pages after they leave?
Still, I will march forward following the path that you outlined above as it is clear from your elegant explanation that that is the proper process to follow to remain within Facebook guidelines (again, thanks for the detailed explanation). Given the scenario we have outlined, it would be enormously helpful if you could add such a use case to the spring social sample projects that your team has developed. Many thanks for the spring-social package, we are making use of it in other scenarios in our application.

[habuma]

Even if they have multiple administrators who could continue posting on their behalf, what's to stop the owner from hijacking the CNN pages after they leave?

Well, assuming that they have multiple administrators, one of the other administrators could remove the original creator as an administrator and block them from hijacking the page. The creator isn't necessarily the owner. I could be wrong, but I believe that if I created a page and assigned you as a co-administrator, you could turn around and remove me as an admin, thus transferring control completely away from me.

Even then, I'm certain that Facebook would (per some of their other policies regarding brands and trademarks) ensure that CNN retain ownership of that page. Of course, if that failed, then there are always legal remedies for such behavior (but I doubt it would go that far).