Capturing available Facebook News, Group, and Wall Feeds is easy on DiscoverText. If you used your Facebook credentials to login (see this orientation video
Archiving Public Facebook Content on the legal and technical issues), start by opening or creating the project in which you want to archive the feed. Next, select
Import Data from the
Project Options box. (
Learn how to Create a New Project)
The Import page will appear and you will see the following section on the page. Click on the Facebook icon.
Special Note: If you do not see the option for Facebook available, it is because you are not
connected to DiscoverText using Facebook and will get see this instead:
Clicking on "
Connect with Facebook" will take you to a Facebook login screen that will log you in and bring you back to DiscoverText. Once that is done you will be able to select the Facebook icon and continue.
Step 1 - Select an Archive or Create a New One
Using the drop-down menu, select an already created archive to have the items gathered from Facebook placed into that Archive. Otherwise, type in a name for a new Archive and click Continue.
Step 2 - Select What Is Being Imported
Because a user must have a Facebook account to use the Facebook Feed gathering tool, you have the option to "Fetch my wall" which will import any text that is on the wall of the person who's credentials are being used by DiscoverText to access Facebook.
NEW DiscoverText now allows you to "Search Public Posts" on Facebook. This means that you can search for your keywords across all publicly available user posts.
If you want to narrow your Facebook search, the Search button allows you to find available Facebook pages, groups, and people. You can search for anyone and anything on Facebook (in this case we searched for "Stephen Colbert", but if the information is not public or you do not have permission to see their wall, the program will not be able to import anything (this is often the reason why you get an imported Archive with 0 files imported). When you search you will get a listing of the top 3 possibilities to choose from in each category.
To choose which page, group, or person that you want to pull information from, click Select. If you do not see the entry you are looking for, click the "
See More..." button for the category you are interested in. You can then browse the vast possibilities page by page. Of course you can always try to refine your search terms and search again. Note: Your ability to collect data from the wall of an individual will be be dependent upon that person's personal privacy settings on Facebook.
Step 3 - Setting Up Recurring Schedules
Because live feeds like Facebook are constantly changing, DiscoverText allows a user to set a timer on which a feed is to be fetched (
What is a "fetch"?).
This option schedules DiscoverText to try to import information on an interval of the user's choice (anywhere from 5 minutes to 7 days). You can choose an end date if you want to cut off the schedule on a specific day but don't want to figure out exactly how many fetches must happen between now and then. Uncheck the box at the top to only get the feed information once. Once you have set the options you want, press the "
Import Feed >>" button. As with all importing processes, you should get a Ingestion OK page upon completion of the import process. DiscoverText will now start gathering the data while you can go about doing other things.
DiscoverText keeps you informed on the current importing tasks (including the Feed you just started importing) using the
Navigation Side Bar and
Notifications. Visit those links to read more.
Additional Options: You can choose to limit your fetches with these options. Open this options panel by clicking on "(+) Additional Options". Here you can set the max number of items you want to get per fetch in case you are expecting tens or hundreds of thousands of items per pull. You can also tell the system to only grab posts and comments that fall in a certain date range. "Include comment items" will pull in sub-comments of a main post or only fetch the main post if unchecked. "Import only items unique to this project" will reduce duplicate information when a feed doesn't change that often by not fetching any posts or comments that have already been added to the project.
Note: Different DiscoverText licenses allow for different number of scheduled feeds happening at the same time. Trial accounts get 5 trial feeds that are single use, while Professional and Enterprise license holders get 25 and 100 re-usable scheduled feeds
Scheduled Feeds
Once you schedule a live feed with multiple fetches , you can view your schedules by clicking on the
"View live feed schedules" button on the Manage Projects page or clicking the "Scheduler" link in the Tools section of the Navigation Side Bar.
This will bring you to the Scheduled Feeds page which lists any active live feeds still occurring.
The following information is available: the
Archive to which the feed is being written, the
Feed Type, the
Feed Path, the number of fetches left to happen (Ends), the time the next fetch is set to occur (Next Fetch), and whether the program is currently fetching information. You can cancel a scheduled feed at any time by clicking the red X located on the far left of the Feed Menu.
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