Show HN: PinView - Your Facebook Feed as a Pinterest View | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: PinView - Your Facebook Feed as a Pinterest View

apps.facebook.com

41 pointsThomPete32 comments

Click anywhere on that page to start your own feed.

A friend of mine and me have been playing around with some ideas about how to show the Facebook feed differently.

Our first experiment is called PinView and basically takes the Pinterest GUI an apply it to your Facebook feed.

We don't track any personal info. The permissions you are asked to grant are purely to be able to represent your own feed in the app.

Wo do of course monitor traffic.

The entire app is done in JavaScript so everything runs on your own machine. It's no secret that we had to make a lot of hacks to get this working fairly well. FB is definitely not an easy animal to tame.

If you have any kind of data blocker activated that should be deactivated to play with it.

Let us know your thoughts.

You can also give feedback (or like) here: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Pin-View-Community/3301634270...

Hey do you guys plan on sharing how you did this? I'm particulary interested in those tweaks you mentioned about to make the stream work. I have some ideas for my news feed but could get off the ground.

Just have a look at their source ;-) http://www.drople.com/index.html?&fb_source=timeline

I'm interested in the how as well but because I'm interested in applying it to different data.

Sure. We will write a post about it soon.

Perfect. Which blog? You have quiet a few. :)

hehe yes. 000fff.org it will get a long awaited revival with lots of stuff there.

It's a really nice way to represent your Facebook Timeline. The key would be on "how to arrange the pins" - based on time OR based on popularity factors like comments,likes etc.

Good point. We will add that

I like the idea but I don't think it works well as an alternative to the current Facebook display. For me my timeline is very much based on time, so when someone has a status "going to dinner at x" it matters that it's displayed before "dinner was great", if it's displayed along side it doesn't make much sense. It works great for photos (and friends) though, it's definitely a cool way to display content just maybe not text.

I think pinterest type displays work for photos etc because it's a way of presenting a lot of content at once that specific items can catch the users eye and they can look at further, that can't happen with text, you have to read it all.

You are totally right. That was our finding too.

We wanted to try it anyway and just put it out there.

The cool thing is that now we have a pretty good idea how the FB feed works and can now experiment with our little js engine.

As someone who is pretty much totally checked out of Facebook and logs in maybe once a month, this might actually get me to check out my timeline more. I love browsing it visually, awesome job!

Thnx m8.

It has potential for sure but as others say. Text is a challenge which we have tried to deal with a little bit.

Let me know if you need help securing the domain pinview.com for this.

Hi ThomPete, I write for 10,000 Words and would love to talk to you a bit more about Pin View for a post. Could you email me at elanazak@gmail.com?

Get ready for volume. This will blow up fast. I'm willing to bet you get a call from FB shortly to either shut it down, or buy it outright.

Nice work.

Cool concept and execution, but my Facebook timeline is very text driven— which makes the PinView render not very readable.

Yeah it's def best if you have lots of pictures.

We have tried to make it as visual as possible. But all feeds are different :)

Well done. One more way to realize everyone in my social circle is boring, but well done.

This isn't working for me in Safari. It does work in Chrome, however, and it looks good!

Ok looking into it. Safari is not as FB friendly :)

On chrome, if there is a post with a bunch of comments at the bottom of the screen, I click on it and the post appears in the lightbox, but the comments get cut off (I can't scroll down).

Just FYI. Looks great, by the way!

Thnx. We are looking into solving this.

There are many little quirks that are quite hard to catch until they happen.

no infinite scroll! hard to make this view look good with things other than photos, but looks pretty good

http://friendsheet.com

Hahaha sign in with Facebook details and no preview or description what so ever - no thanks.

mark zuckerberg signed in and liked it with no preview, why wouldn't you?

Heh nice.

I'll put the name of the activity on top of the image. e.g, "Jane shared this picture" before the picture. Make it more 'readable'in my opinion.

Perfect as a tablet app. not sure it will fly on the desktop or mobile phone.

Yes that might work better.

Am I the only one who thinks PinFace is a better name?

Believe me we tried other combinations but Face and Book are not accessible so we can't call an app anything like PinBook og Faceterest :)

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