Instagram DM Automation without API (read only) - api

me and my colleagues receive quiet many instagram dms accross all of our accounts and it became taxing to get ahold of everything which is why I want to automate the process.
If I want to filter my instagram messages on specific keywords and get an altert on dms that match certain keyword - do I need to use the instagram api or can I automate the process myself? Scraping content is against the api as far as I know, is it the same for dms?
If I have to use the api (sadly), am I the only one that has to setup the facebook app and can my colleagues also use the app with their accounts?
I fear that it might be against their tos if I dont use their api, I tried reading through the tos and developer guidelines but there is so much input.
But this seems like an against their terms of use to me.

Related

Fastest way to determine whether or not Instagram account follows certain user?

Currently trying to figure out how to check whether or not very large Instagram accounts (10M+ followers) are following a list of 30-40k users. Scraping all followers doesn't seem to be a very viable solution, as Instagram rate limits at every ~10k requests (so naturally, scraping 50-60M usernames would take very long).
The Instagram app has a search-bar feature that obviously lets one check whether or not an account follows someone; however, I'm not entirely sure how to replicate this functionality on web.
Does anyone know of any ways to achieve this functionality through a Selenium-like bot and / or utilize the Instagram API?
Figured it out! For anyone who has a similar goal, I accomplished the above with two approaches:
1.) Appium / Selenium automation w/ Android emulator (takes advantage of the Instagram native-only search fucntionality)
2.) Overkill: Fiddler and patched Instagram APK (SSL cert-pinning disabled) to find the actual query to see whether a user is following another).

What is the most efficient way to automate your Instagram?

Over the past few weeks, I've spent some time researching about Instagram automation the goal being to have a program that can like and comment for me. I've come up with the following solutions:
Use a browser automation library like selenium to navigate through Instagram's website.
Cons: really botchy code that becomes useless as soon as Instagram renames their css classes which they do from time to time
Have a Android emulator running and automate that.
Cons: every instance of that emulator would require like 2 gigs of storage and would be really inefficient.
So how do for example apps on the play-/app store do it? They only have the small processing power of the phone available and still run effortless in the background.
Is there another solution that I'm missing?
The most efficient way to automate Instagram is to use the Instagram API. Using that API you can publish photos with users, tags and locations [1]. I don't find any immediate mention of Stories etc., but most likely if you work more with the API you find where/how to do that.
The also linked Instagram Platform API seems to be in a state of discontinuation.
As you tagged your question "Selenium", no, Selenium does not provide a reasonable approach for interfacing with Instagram as Selenium provides no way to make POST requests. You could try to automate the website through Selenium, but using the API is far more straightforward, less prone to layout changes and the officially sanctioned way.
[1] https://developers.facebook.com/docs/instagram-api/content-publishing
The way I did it at the end was that I used the Instagram Private API for Instagram on GitHub:
https://github.com/ping/instagram_private_api
That way I didn't have to emulate an entire device actually browsing through Instagram.

Is there a way to register an application on Google+ like on Facebook?

In particular I'm interested in the possibility of getting an App Access Token with no expiration time, exactly as I do with Facebook.
I want to publish on behalf of the user via server, and I found very useful and convenient the Facebook's procedure in which we ask for the user permissions only the first time.
I have been working with this kind of social-networks interaction for merely three weeks, so I will be very happy to hear any type of suggestions or critics.
Google+ does not currently have a public write API. There are selected partners that they work with (such as HootSuite) that provide this feature, but they are making access to it available very slowly. See https://developers.google.com/+/api/pages-signup for further details.
Google+ does have a concept of Moments, which are activities that happen in your app that are reported to Google+ and which the user may later wish to share, or may make available to people in their circles on a limited non-notification basis. This is probably not what you want, but may serve some needs. See https://developers.google.com/+/api/latest/moments for more info and examples how to use it.
Simply, No there is no way to do that in Google+ in current time. In general, apps for Google plus is read only.

How To Get Started Working with the Google AdWords API?

I'm a student working on a project related to SEO; I need to write an optimization tool, so I'm writing an application using C# and Windows Forms. The main part of the application is for keyword selection, and I want to use the Google AdWords API to obtain a list of keywords.
I downloaded the C# client library, but can't understand how to set up the project: I am getting the error:
"An API exception has occurred. See ApiExecption and InnerException fields for more details".
Maybe I have made a mistake when I edited the App.config file as I haven't changed anything else. Can anyone advise me where I should begin? I would be grateful to hear your ideas.
Unfortunatley, the AdWords API isn't as open as you might think: It's meant for ad agencies managing large accounts, or software vendors who want to build ad management platforms. You need to apply to Google for an API key to gain access; they used to give them out to nearly anyone with an account, and it took about 14 days to process the application. However, Google has got very strict about their terms and conditions over the past 12 months, and to put it simply, you probably won't meet them if you're building an SEO tool; even if you apply to build a full platform, you'll need to wait six to ten weeks for approval as they've got a huge backlog of applications to process at the moment.
As this is just a student project, you should actually be able to get away with just using the AdWords API sandbox, which is open to anyone with a Google account. This won't give you real keywords or stats, but would demonstrate your understanding of the platform.
Another option would be to check out the Ad Intelligence Service of the adCenter API; you'd still need to open an adCenter account (with a $5 activation fee), but you should be able to get an adCenter API key without waiting too long. The stats available from Microsoft won't be as extensive as what Google has to offer, but will still be relevant to the at least the US market. Also, being Microsoft, they've got a good range of C# examples.
You could use the sandbox, but it is good only for testing purposes. You won't get real values for traffic estimation and keyword ideas.
To use the sandbox, what you need is a Google account (your gmail account for instance). To initialize the sandbox,
In your App.config, put email/password/developerToken as your email / your password / youremail++USD (e.g. john.doe#gmail.com++USD)
Run the GetCampaigns.cs code example. It is under v201109/BasicOperations folder in the C# examples project. This will initialize the sandbox.
Run the GetAccountHierarchy.cs code example. It is under v201109/AccountManagement folder. This will give you 5 client emails and their customer ids.
Use one of these customerIds in the ClientCustomerId field of App.config.
Run any other code example.
The video is a bit outdated, due to recent changes in AdWords API, I need to update it.
you can find a very good article series about adwords api there: Google Adwords API
it is not that hard to learn how to use it! I think the API itself is very good documented and there is a good suppo from google.

Is it possible to develop a Facebook app that filters updates out of a feed?

Namely, does the Facebook API make this possible? I'd like to leave my news feed intact, but remove posts that meet some criteria for things I don't want to see (e.g., don't show me anything that sounds like Dick Cheney might have said it). Does the Facebook API allow apps to customize a user's normal news feed? I spent a few minutes looking at the facebook developer pages, but didn't see any direct answers to my question, so I was hoping some developers who were experienced with Facebook's API could help me here.
Before anyone mentions it, I don't want to just hide updates from those users. They may post other updates that I want to see, so I'd prefer to filter out updates based on content.
There is a Greasemonkey script called "Facebook Purity" which does this. You could probably look at the source and alter it to your specifications.
You could parse the news feed into a database on your site then use code to parse whether or not to display it.
yes this is possible but only if all your friends decide to add your application! otherwise you may be not able to access their feeds.
Its been a while since i used Facebook SDK so this may have changed.
The API provides very little news feed integration, and no you can't use the api to prevent news feed items from showing up in a users feed. All you can do is post and get, and you can only post 10 items a day, "significant" interactions. The Facebook API wasn't designed to enhance or alter the core Facebook experience, it was designed to allow developers to create third party apps that add to Facebook within a very limited and tightly controlled sandbox.
The Linq to facebook project looks quite interesting and may allow you to do what you are asking (if using .NET 3.5). My apologies for a link to such a pink website ;-)