Hacker News Reader

Comment by modeless | Hacker News Reader

A social media, messaging, and news aggregator that screen-scrapes or otherwise accesses FB, Twitter, Instagram, FB Messenger, WhatsApp, iMessage, Hangouts, GMail, HN, Reddit, etc, and integrates them all into one unified interface.

This of course would violate ToS agreements and various services would try to block it. But if it ran as a local app instead of in the cloud, and it was regularly updated, it would be very difficult to block with either technical or legal means.

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Well, I have been trying a hobby-dev project that is kinda along these lines but I am almost on the verge of giving up.

The problem is, the feed/stream API endpoints for most of the services mentioned above, either do not exist or have been removed.

- FB and Instagram no longer provide them, for sure.

- WhatsApp doesn't have an official API - the last time I test-drove Yowsup, my number was 'blocked' by WhatsApp.

- No idea if there's an API for iMessage, although I get the feeling there mightn't be...

Screen-scraping all of these services is way too much effort for way little reward. Not to mention that FB keeps 'updating' its UI/UX quite frequently and Instagram doesn't show a 'feed' on the web if you login.

- FB messenger is based off the XMPP protocol, so yeah, there might be a way to access it without having to screen-scrape.

- There's a free/paid service called Integrated Inbox which integrates Google's services: http://integratedinbox.com/plans/

That leaves HN, reddit and the Google gang - is it really worth the time to integrate these into one service? Maybe one could build the basic structure over the weekend and then provide an option add-on different sites as a 'plugin'...

Well yeah, screen scraping would be required. The core of the product would have to be a screen scraping engine that makes it easy to build screen scrapers fast. You'd also have to commit to daily updates of all the various screen scrapers to keep them working. Without that it would fail.

Perhaps a machine learning approach could work.

You could be a little bit more adversarial in the approach. Create several accounts, have them each message one another. Since you know the message and can use OCR, you can easily automate compensation for changes in the UI.

Sounds like a good weekend project. Most of those have APIs for what you couldn't screen scrape.

I wonder what this would look like. Just a bunch of tiles butted against each other with their respective logos/color schemes?

All in all, it's the same information. Could have different colored tiles for different services, so you can use the avatar icons from the accounts themselves. Then it's just text or image or video. Click to make the tile full screen to show the full post information and all the relevent actions you can take for that service. Could also show the full conversation and/or comments, depending on the service.

Or instead of tiles, it could be single lines like in IRC. Maybe an icon somewhere in there to show if there's an image or video to view. Hover preview?

Nope, never spent any time thinking about it. No, siree. ;)

I thought about these tiles that move (scroll forever) their lifespan is the length of the screen. So you'd have to workout a ratio or something to be similar on all devices.

Each time can be a gateway to a real chat. I don't know what it would be for. But each tile can have a photo, video, text, ads, etc...

Just a continuous stream of content that only ends if no one clicks on it. Max life time (idle) of say 10min.

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