Facebook Graph API : get larger pictures in one request

Graph API is the smart choice in most cases. To retrieve your friend information you need to collect some extended permissions from the user first. Then you can retrieve a lot more information other than the basic ones.

Following is a list of extended permissions related to friends different kind of information

friends_about_me        
friends_activities      
friends_birthday
friends_checkins        
friends_education_history       
friends_events
friends_games_activity      
friends_groups      
friends_hometown
friends_interests       
friends_likes       
friends_location
friends_notes       
friends_online_presence     
friends_photo_video_tags 
friends_photos      
friends_relationship_details        
friends_relationships
friends_religion_politics       
friends_status      
friends_subscriptions
friends_videos      
friends_website     
friends_work_history

Hope it helps :)

In v2.0 of the Graph API, calling /me/friends returns the person's friends who also use the app.

In addition, in v2.0, you must request the user_friends permission from each user. user_friends is no longer included by default in every login. Each user must grant the user_friends permission in order to appear in the response to /me/friends. See the Facebook upgrade guide for more detailed information, or review the summary below.

If you want to access a list of non-app-using friends, there are two options:

1. If you want to let your people tag their friends in stories that they publish to Facebook using your App, you can use the /me/taggable_friends API. Use of this endpoint requires review by Facebook and should only be used for the case where you're rendering a list of friends in order to let the user tag them in a post.

2. If your App is a Game AND your Game supports Facebook Canvas, you can use the /me/invitable_friends endpoint in order to render a custom invite dialog, then pass the tokens returned by this API to the standard Requests Dialog.

In other cases, apps are no longer able to retrieve the full list of a user's friends (only those friends who have specifically authorized your app using the user_friends permission). This has been confirmed by Facebook as 'by design'.

For apps wanting allow people to invite friends to use an app, you can still use the Send Dialog on Web or the new Message Dialog on iOS and Android.

UPDATE: Facebook have published an FAQ on these changes here: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/apps/faq which explain all the options available to developers in order to invite friends etc.