The vast majority of data stored on Facebook is available to developers through what is known as the Graph API, which is a system that closely resembles the REST protocols. This Graph API makes data available as Objects, through specific URLs, and it is using those URLs that we send and retrieve information.
The introduction to the Graph API, from Facebook's own Developer Documentation (http://developers.facebook.com/docs/api) describes the Graph API like so:
"[...]The Graph API presents a simple, consistent view of the Facebook social graph, uniformly representing objects in the graph (e.g., people, photos, events, and pages) and the connections between them (e.g., friend relationships, shared content, and photo tags).
Every object in the social graph has a unique ID. You can access the properties of an object by requesting https://graph.facebook.com/ID. For example, the official page for the Facebook Platform has id
19292868552
, so you can fetch the object at https://graph.facebook...