Facebook Events

Recently I took a dive into the Facebook API to see what information was available for group and event photos. As for my original intent, I learned about an undocumented feature in the facebook.photos.get method, which accepts a “gid” or “eid” value to return group and event photos respectively. This proved to be pretty handy and JD Conley has implemented it into his Photo Feeds application. Aside from this a few test queries in the sandbox revealed a wealth of information on Facebook about me, much of which I thought was eliminated. When you are invited to an event Facebook records your user id as a member of that event, a concept that makes semantically makes sense. Of course, upon this action you are notified and given three primary choices “Attending, Maybe Attending and Not Attending.” I get invited to a lot of events, many of which I am not interested in attending much less having my user id associated with it. The user interface prompts you to select one of the three, all of which maintain your connection to the event. Originally I assumed that “Not Attending” simply removed the event, but underneath these three buttons is a textual link “Remove from My Events” which will completely dissociate your user id and prevent unwanted event invitations from embarrassing you in the future. You can always select “Past Events” and select “Remove” on the right to do this post-invitation, if you like. I’m off to delete some events.