Mar 6, 2009

Automatic Birthday Wishes on Facebook

EDIT: 29/06/2009 - a new, better and more elegant version has been released. I encourage users to switch over to that one.
Announcement is HERE

Well here we are again. Update time! :|

A few months ago I put together a little script that would automatically write on the walls of any of your friends of Facebook (limited to privacy settings of said individuals of course). The script was/is largely based on the Command line application by Dave Tompkins.

as of the most recent update, my script is no longer compatible with the new version. So a few changes were in order. So here it is.

unlike the previous version, you don't need to patch anything. Just a vanilla install of fbcmd + this script and that's it.

download script from HERE


Installation:

1.Download and install fbcmd, follow instructions from HERE
2.Download my script, and put it anywhere you want.
3.Edit the email,password fields in the script: and locations of the fbcmd files
4.Run it manually, or setup a cron job for it.

the setup should be fairly straightforward. Please note that the wall post procedure is not officially supported by facebook, and may break from time to time (because facebook may change their page structure). Please report any bugs ASAP and I'll will try to have them fixed as soon as I can.

have fun!

21 Comments:

Anonymous said...

this is a tricky one...coz many people are changing their birthday on facebook to see who the "real" friends are...damn!!!!!

SoE said...

Yes I can see how that would be tricky, but you could always move over to a locally maintained list and not depend on the facebook birthdays. I don't see how that would be too hard to code either

Anonymous said...

excellent work friend! I didn't particularly like all the hassles of the old version. This is ALMOST simple enough.

Unknown said...

Nice work! Although in addition to a b-day wish for my friends, the script updates my own status with a b-day wish. Is this intended?

SoE said...

No it's not, I hadn't noticed this behaviour. I'll look into it.

Anonymous said...

Did you ever try scripting against Facebook's main page? I tried that for a long time but couldn't get around the widget interface.

SoE said...

I hadn't. It's heavily reliant on ajax and stuff so this type of scripting wouldn't be very effective on it, plus it's faster to go in through the mobile page.

Daniel said...

Any idea of how to do the same on Windows?
Thanks in advance!

SoE said...

I've decided to re-write the whole thing in PHP alone so that it would be platform independent. I'll work on it after my exams and shouldn't take too long so keep an eye out.

Anonymous said...

Looking forward to the new PHP version, thank you for this very useful tool!

Anonymous said...

Can someone please help me install this....i got the fbcmd installed but can't seem to figure out the next part...mikeyagoodman@gmail.com....

SoE said...

new version is up

sdblepas said...

Hi here what i get i guess it's because it' no longuer fbcmd but fbcmd_update.php
ben@ubuntu:~/Desktop/bdaywish$ ./fbbdaywish
Thu Dec 3 00:55:59 PST 2009 Hello and welcome to a brand new day
Could not open input file: /home/ben/home/ben/fbcmd_update.php
Thu Dec 3 00:55:59 PST 2009 No birthdays today, or ERROR has occured
Thu Dec 3 00:55:59 PST 2009 finished - see you tomorrow~!

SoE said...

this version is no longer supported. Please use the latest version.

Anonymous said...

I can't seem to figure out how to run this. Can someone help me? I installed FBCMD and ran it and it works - updates my status fine. Just not sure how to run this file and get it to update birthdays for me. Can anyone tell me how to run it? socialmediamail@yahoo.com Thanks.

Anonymous said...

there seems to be another app doing the same
http://indikabandara19.blogspot.com/2010/05/facebook-automatic-birthday-wishes.html

Anonymous said...

Could I implement this script running it with Greasemonkey in Firefox on a Windows computer? I write brithday wishes every day!

schnecki said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Swapnil said...

good work bro.. autobudder sucks now.. this is much better

Unknown said...

I'm looking to private message my friends instead of on their walls
and I'd like the message to be able to send 2-3 weeks prior to their birthdays. Is this possible?

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