Introduction to Friends and Followers Relationships¶
GetSocial support two types of user to user relationships:
- Mutual friend relationships.
- Following and follower relationships.
Friend Relationship¶
Friends feature lets you add a concept of friends to your app. Up until now, the most common way to build this was with the help of Facebook login through the Facebook Graph API. However, not every user or their friends will authenticate with Facebook, therefore, limiting the connections your users can have within your app. Additionally, users also have friends, outside Facebook like WhatsApp, Twitter, Instagram, and so on.
GetSocial automatically adds Facebook friends and also friends successfully invited through Smart Invites feature. In addition to that, you can enable your users to discover other users and manually add them as friends.
Populating Friends¶
There are 3 ways to create a relationship between users in Friends:
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Explicitly add a friend to the current user via the SDK to Build Friends Relationships.
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User sends Smart Invite link and the receiving person installs the app.
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Facebook identity was added to the user and we were able to find some of his/her friends, who are already using the app with Facebook attached.
Querying the Friends¶
Right now, there are 3 types of queries you can make to Friends, related to the user.
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Get the list of friends of the current user.
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Get the count of friends of the current user (useful for displaying badges).
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Check, if a user is the friend of the current user.
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Get the list of suggested friends for the current user. “Suggested friends” are the users with whom the current user has mutual friends.
Querying the Friends article has the exact SDK method descriptions for each platform.
Following and Follower Relationship¶
In addition to friend relationships, GetSocial also supports following and follower relationships similar to that of Twitter, Instagram, and other social networks. Users in your app can follow other users or influencers. When combined with our Activity feed feature users get a personalized timeline of content from users they follow.