Show HN: Facebook Open Graph Redirect Chrome Extension | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Facebook Open Graph Redirect Chrome Extension

chronline.posterous.com

84 pointsjodoglevy25 comments

This is probably the 12th such Chrome plugin we have seen now. We released ours a couple of days after frictionless sharing was announced.

The extension gets complicated when you attempt to get it working for all variety of apps, because app developers are constantly updating the DOM to bypass our filters.

See this previous thread for details when another one of these was announced:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3810897

see our original project and the code we have so far to getting this to work with other social apps:

https://github.com/byoogle/frictionless

I really wish we could have one project that works in all cases, rather than 12 projects that work in 5% of cases.

We are catching around 50% of cases at the moment with this code:

https://github.com/byoogle/frictionless/blob/master/webkit/f...

but it is moving all the time. I am currently in the process of writing a generic rule engine that can be updated from outside of the extension (compare this to just searching on uiconnect.php in links).

Feel free to fork and contribute to existing code (I can't imagine that one of these previous projects wouldn't have come up if you Google searched).

I think one issue with finding projects working on this already is that its hard to explain the concept to search for. Is this Facebook feature called "social reader"? Is it called "frictionless sharing?" "Open graph?" Users don't know how to name the feature in a way to search meaningfully for a way to block it, and there's no standard name among developers to search for preexisting efforts to contribute to.

I managed to find the "Unsocial Reader" while searching for previous efforts. I did not find "Frictionless", maybe because I didn't search for "frictionless sharing blocker," because that's not a term I thought to use.

In the case of Unsocial Reader, I saw it was doing Google "I'm feeling lucky" searches based on the title and figured the way I was doing it was more streamlined for the user because it was actually based on the article URL, and since my extension searches for a URL specific to Facebook (uiconnect.php) no changes to the DOM by app developers would bypass the fact that it still has to go through that Facebook URL.

In terms of cases it covers, it has worked every time I needed it to while I was on Facebook, but yes that was the extent of the testing I did. I think it is unfair to claim that all other projects besides your own work in only 5% of cases, considering the Unsocial Reader has almost 3x the users of Frictionless and a better star rating in the Chrome Web Store. Also, since a few sites represent the vast majority of the open graph links on Facebook (ex Yahoo), blocking their installers is most important to most users.

This was a weekend project of the mentality "I can get 80% of the results with 20% of the effort." It's something I threw together, just to solve my own problems (with Facebook and with being unable to find a plugin that fixed the problem). But now that Frictionless has been brought to my attention, I will certainly look over the source and see if there's a way I can contribute. Thanks.

The article says that Facebook forces you to install the publisher's app when you click one of these links, but that isn't actually true. It's up to the publisher whether or not they want to prompt for an install to view the content. This is what Facebook calls authenticated referrals: http://goo.gl/CQld3

As far as I know, from working on an open graph app, you can either not prompt for an install of the app, or require an install of the app. You can't ask for an install but not require it to see the content.

Unfortunately, a lot of big news sites go with the force method, including Yahoo.

There is a definitely another subset that prompts you and when you select Close takes you to the article.

You can easily achieve that by redirecting traffic from facebook to the app request page and simply allowing people through when they chose 'cancel'.

You do not get to show the app permission request as a dialog but that te only way you can put a gate before your contet and still allow ppl that select cancel to go through.

Precisely. There is a better way to do it, and Facebook should be encouraging it so users don't hate the feature as much as they already do.

If you're implementing this sort of thing, do it the way ProPublica does: http://www.propublica.org/article/introducing-a-new-non-evil...

I would imagine that this can be easily converted into a GreaseMonkey userscript. Since you have chosen to implement this for Chrome, the question which naturally comes to my mind is - is it even easier to write these addons for Chrome than writing an userscript?

Firefox user here, considering to switch for some time.

Chrome Extensions are pretty easy to write (at least the basic stuff) but Chrome also has user-script support built right in.

OP here. I have never worked on a GreaseMonkey script before...only used a Chrome extension because it seemed to fit the project requirements and it was the first thing that came to mind.

That said, I did find it extremely easy to create a Chrome extension. Really nice to have access to the DOM straight through javascript. Check out the source code for this extension...only took a few lines to write the actual logic

Hi, I made this extension compatible with Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/facebook-open...

On Github: https://github.com/xpressyoo/open-graph-redirect

This is very good, thank you! I usually just copy the text and search it on Google to find the real article.

My friends and I do the same thing: highlight and google the title of the article instead of clicking on the link. The funny thing is we all learned to do this on our own! Quite disappointed to see FB recently added JS code to prohibit users from highlighting the title of the article (presumably to discourage users from doing this).

Most aren't stupid enough to lose traffic from people refusing to install their app so if you hit "No" or "Close" most will redirect you to the article anyway. The alternative is to set it to "only me" in the dropdown on who can see what you read.

OP here. Actually, if you hit No or Close, none of these apps will redirect you to the article. Not possible with Facebook's current implementation. I know because I've worked on one of these Open Graph apps for The Duke Chronicle.

Only possibilities are, when the user clicks the link, to either bring them straight to the article, or ask them to install the app and if they hit "Yes," bring them to the article. Not possible to show the install app dialog box but not force an install in order to be redirected to the article. I wish it was though!

In terms of setting it to "only me" for sharing, yes that definitely works. But you're still giving the app read access to some of your Facebook info, and many users won't even think to change the setting to "only me" unfortunately.

The Guardian app (possibly UK only...not sure) redirects directly to the article if you click No and then remembers that you did that and redirects you directly from then on. Definitely the best implementation I've seen but I don't know the details about exactly how they did it.

It's possible to set your own "cancel url" if you just redirect people directly to the OAuth flow.

As mentioned by sdcooke the Guardian allows you to click "no" and view the article anyway, there are a few others (I believe Yahoo) but I've not clicked on any in a few days so I don't recall which exactly. Maybe it's a country specific implementation, I'm in the UK.

Interesting...I certainly could be wrong or the functionality may have changed since I last looked in to it. I do know for a fact that when I click "no" on the Yahoo links it brings me back to Facebook, not the article. I'm in the US.

I've implemented the Open Graph for Pipe Dream, my college newspaper. I'd love to find out how it's working for the Chronicle! You can reach me at doconnor@bupd.me.

Whenever I encounter one of these articles, I just google the title. Easy enough for me.

This is great!

I'm glad to see that this was created! There has definitely been more than one time where I had a friend who read an article that interested me, hit the "install app page" and closed the tab.

This is just another example of Facebook wanting to collect more and more and more data about us.

Ever since Facebook got more and more involved with the "app" fad, I used it less and less. Currently it tells me when events are, birthdays, and occasionally I'll browse some friends and see what's new.

Facebook left my focal point of browsing a long time ago, what about you?

"This is just another example of Facebook wanting to collect more and more and more data about us."

Not really, Facebook already has the data, this is the app trying to get more data from you.

Exactly. It's not so much "Facebook collecting" as "Facebook giving away" your data.

How long will it be before people assert rights over their own graph? When apps like this slurp down your entire Facebook life without compensating beyond an article read, there's a kind of sharecropping going on.

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