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Show HN: Blockify

blockify.me

18 pointsbousquetcm10 comments

I've done this, except I found it to be mostly worthless.

why?

We all restrict what other people's apps can see of ours.

What does this mean?

most stories aren't visible. The first 10 stories that I see through the graph api correspond to about the first 100 stories I see through my facebook newsfeed (this same limitation also applies to using facebook's own "download your data" app, as it is implemented through the graph api without any special access). This also means that if you post a comment to friend's story (and see on your page/timeline "commented on X...", if that friend restricted api access to their data, you will not only not be able to access the comment (that you wrote), you won't even see it in json dump of the page via the graph api.

In all honesty, the only way to do it "right" (in quotes for a reason, as not really right(tm), and with facebook's current limitations) is to basically parse their dom and rewrite it. That's also something I've experimented with (and have a relatively simple implementation), however, they change things constantly!

Agree on the difficulty, but Im not seeing any gaps in my data outside of what I have purposely filtered out. I have it based on pulling my stream, assuming I am the one who is logged in.

I will be sure to constantly compare and contrast the actual FB stream against the Blockify.me stream. The main frustration I am having is that the Graph API response time is twice as long as the REST api, that is now deprecated. We are looking into what calls can be batched and where we can use caching to speed up the app.

I do appreciate your sharing your experience so that I can learn from it.

I'm telling you I've compared your blockify stream to my newsfeed stream it has huge gaps. The gaps are due to my friends restrictions. you might not have friends that restrict "foreign" apps (i.e. your apps access to their data). I think that's not the common case.

I got tired of the facebook clutter, spam etc. So, after the last backlash over the stream, my partners and I started experimenting in making our own client.

It says "Log in to your Facebook account" but it doesn't tell me what I get if I do.

Please build an informative landing page. Even if it's just a couple sentences (maybe these two from your comment?) and a screenshot. Thanks

I can't believe we overlooked the homepage. Wow. NIFD (Now I Feel Dumb). Great callout HN! Thanks for taking the time to comment! We should have a new graphic up soon.

I rarely use that "log in with Facebook" thing... and I pretty much never use it if I don't know what I'm getting for it.

This is basically a reskin of Facebook. "Log in with Facebook" is actually necessary for this app to do anything.

I like the idea of a reskinned Facebook... but that is a pretty broad concept. A set of screen shots and a couple paragraphs is probably all it would take. I barely trust Facebook with my Facebook data. How am I to just blindly trust some other site with my Facebook data without even seeing anything about what it does?

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