Starting April 30th 2015, the Facebook API will be making changes to the way that we (and all 3rd party websites) interact with their platform. These changes include new restrictions on how we access and post to your Facebook groups.
We know how important posting to groups is for our users. We have been working hard to determine the right path forward with Facebook to meet their terms of use and continue to provide our users with the functionality they have come to love.
On April 30th 2015 Facebook will migrate all existing applications running on v1.0 of their API (what is an API?) to v2.0, but what does that mean for you? The biggest difference for users of TinyTorch is that Facebook no longer allows us (or 3rd party websites) to access a list of a user’s groups, or post to private or closed groups. In the older version of their API (the version currently running on social.tinytorch.com), Facebook allowed websites to access a user’s list of groups if that user granted permission to the app. However, starting on April 30th, 2015 this is no longer the case.
“The good news is we believe we have a solution for allowing users to continue to schedule to public groups directly from TinyTorch.”
We have been working with Facebook to try and determine the right way to provide our users with the functionality they desire while still abiding by Facebook’s terms of use. However, despite our best efforts, it seems there is not much we can do about this new change to accessing groups and posting to private groups.
The good news is we believe we have a solution for allowing users to continue to schedule to public groups directly from TinyTorch. We realize this is not as ideal as we would all hope (being limited to public groups) however, it still provides a way for our users to interact with their groups via the TinyTorch platform.
The TinyTorch team is actively working on implementing this solution and we hope to release the feature soon on the new beta site.
Users of the existing “legacy” website (found at social.tinytorch.com), will continue to have access to their Facebook groups up until April 30th. At that time, Facebook will force us to upgrade to the latest version of their API and the functionality will cease on that website.
All other features for scheduling to Facebook will remain unchanged: listing and posting to profiles, pages, events.
More details to come. Be sure to follow us on Facebook, Twitter and this blog for more announcements about this feature.