I’ve long wanted to be able to add Facebook to the list of sources that my elmcity service queries for local event information. It was never possible before, but the recent changes to the Facebook API (and terms of service) prompted me to take another look.

At first glance, it seems doable. Here are some sample queries:

http://elmcity.info/fb_events?location=keene,nh

http://elmcity.info/fb_events?location=ann arbor, mi

http://elmcity.info/fb_events?location=portsmouth,nh

You can see what turns up for your town by swapping in your city and state. A lot of the events are public and could reasonably be included in a citywide aggregation. But then there are ones like this:

SURPRISE Lantheaume Baby Shower
1000 Market Street, Portsmouth, NH 03801
2010-06-26T20:00:00+0000

Clearly this baby shower should not appear on a citywide public calendar. Why does search find it? Let’s look at the data about this event that’s visible to the world:

{ “id”: “314667046847″,
“owner”: {
“name”: “Jesse Barnes”,
“id”: “11000551″},
“name”: “SURPRISE Lantheaume Baby Shower”,
“description”: “Baby \”Ox\” is on his or her way! Come and celebrate with the mom-to-be and her closest friends and family! Please remember to bring your decorated onesie so that we can display them for Kris. \n\nLook on this site for additional details that are still being determined. “,
“start_time”: “2010-06-26T20:00:00+0000″,
“end_time”: “2010-06-26T23:00:00+0000″,
“location”: “1000 Market Street, Portsmouth, NH 03801″,
“privacy”: “CLOSED”,
“updated_time”: “2010-04-02T15:01:10+0000″}

When you create a private event, there are three options:

Open: Anyone can see this Event and its content.

Closed: Anyone can see this Event, but its content is only shown to guests.

Secret: Only people who are invited can see this Event and its content.

Clearly Jesse should have marked this event Secret, not Closed. Until very recently, an error like that would be unlikely to result in an embarrassing information leak. But now things have changed, and people are going to start learning harsh lessons about the visibility of their Facebook stuff.

I don’t see any way to teach my service to exclude events that people marked as Closed because they thought it meant Secret. So I guess elmcity’s Facebook feature is going to have to wait until those lessons are learned.

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