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Show HN: Does Facebook know your friends better than you do?

youmewe.it

34 pointsmaxkiener47 comments

It's a really nice tech demo. I like the animations and it's well delivered. If you were to try and make it more of a "product" (ie more useful for the user and less about exploring the tech behind it), you might want to dig into more interesting facts. The months my friends were born in isn't very interesting. How many of them are married, what state/country they live in, etc would be more fun.

I did get a little carried away by experimenting with vectors in a browser and js/jquery in general. Thanks for the feedback.

Cool animations and simple idea.

(Just a friendly reminder for everyone else: remember to delete the app from you Facebook. You can find it by the name you.me.we on Settings > App Settings)

Danke!

Is it possible for your app (or any) to offer to revoke it's own access after it's finished?

its a nice idea, i'd like that also but don't know of such fb-functionality. in my case i have no use for the permissions. maybe permissions with an expiry date would be great.

  Revoking Login

  You can also let people completely de-authorize an app, or revoke login, by making a call to this Graph API endpoint:

  DELETE /{user-id}/permissions

  This request must be made with a valid user access token or an app access token for the current app. If the request is successful, your app receives a response of true. If the call is successful, any user access token for the person will be invalidated and they will have to log in again. Because you're de-authorizing your app, they will also have to grant access to your app as if they were logging in for the first time.

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/facebook-login/permissi...

Thanks

FYI with firefox + adblock + ghostery I see only the static landing page with broken "about" link.

Thanks, i have only really tested with chrome , firefox and mobile safari all without special plugins (i didn't even know ghostery was until a minute ago)

Ghostery blocks Facebook stuff like Graph, which in this case is a useful feature.

Perhaps try disabling some addons? I'm guessing its ghostery.

I guess the point I was trying to make is: It might be good for a web artifact like this to degrade gracefully when browsers (and their addons) interfere.

Like "you seem to be blocking Facebook with XYZ..." or a similar message. Realize it's just a prototype -- can understand if you don't want to take the trouble.

Cool idea in any case.

> you.me.we. will receive the following info: your public profile, friend list and birthday and your friends' birthdays.

Why would I give someone else's info to this application? I'm not even sure it's polite.

P.S. The issue here is not that I need to give some information about myself, I can perhaps deal with that, the issue is that I'm giving information about my friends. It make me feel a bit like a snitch :-)

it is a questionaire about yourself and the app needs the data to create the questions. it is plain javascript with no backend attached to it. the data only gets sent back and forth between your browser and fb. none of your data ever gets stored on "my" server. hope this helps.

> the data only gets sent back and forth between your browser and fb

That's... actually a very interesting way to put it.

There should be a way to make a Facebook application that could guarantee it can't leak information to any other server.

It can't be done. I could get the data from FB with javascript, and If I'm using it, I can sent it to my server with another request, so there is no way to block that.

I know, that's why I'm saying there should be a way.

One solution would be for Facebook to host the app, and to run its content in a sandbox (using something like Google's Caja?).

Another approach would be a system permission at the browser level, where a page could explicitly request to restrict what it is allowed to do.

Then you could have an approach where the app asks Facebook for this and that permissions, but accepts to be sandboxed to only have access to Facebook's domains. The request goes to FB as it does now. FB calls the return URL, but it opens it in tab with specially sandboxed permissions.

Everyone wins: the app makes it clear there's no information leak possible and the user is feeling safer.

I'm not saying any of this is trivial to implement. But it would make sense from a user perspective.

1/5 Apparently I don't know anything about my friends.

Cool info graphic in the end though!

http://youmewe.it/result.html?M0=10&O1=10&M2=6&M3=9&M4=16&M5...

Venushügel:

https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fyo...

Hmm... I answered "younger" to the "Do you think your friends are on average older or younger?" question and it claimed the answer is wrong, giving the average of 29.24 years. I turned 30 in June.

Incidentally, I think the question would be better framed in terms of the median age - ie. "Do you think the majority of your friends are older or younger than you?"

yeah, i was on the verge about median age or average age... about the age error, i dont know why that happens. i calculate your age by year but that should still return 30 and validate to "right".

mine was wrong to. I am 34, my friends average 32.XX. I put younger and was told wrong.

sorry for asking, but just to rule one thing out, you did tell facebook your actual age, right?

Holy shit, you're definitely going to have to explain that graphic at the end. I looked at it for over a minute and I've absolutely no idea what it's supposed to represent or even what kind of chart it is or what the axes are.

did you look at it on desktop? on the phone i chose abbreviations which fall short (no pun intended). the idividual letters are the months. the white curve is total friends' birthdays over months, red and blue curves are male and female birthdays per month respecively. the lavenderish curve compares the number of males and female friends. and the bottom (strong blue) curve compares your age to the age of your friends.

Yes, I'm sure a lot of work went into that graph, but it makes absolutely no sense to me whatsoever.

i did prioritize the looks of it over readability. i was hoping it would make a nice background to a phone or desktop, but i will keep working on alternatives. im sure it can be done better.

Nice message in the dev console :)

3/5. Fun idea and I liked the age data

Thanks. I'm blushing, it's my first HN post (and first .js app)

@cel1ne, you were a little too quick, i guess it hadn't fetched your data from fb. should work if you reload and give it a few seconds...let me know

I learned that no one tells facebook their real age. My "youngest" friend was a senior when I was a freshman.

Wrong. NaN% of your friends are male... NEXT

If you reload and give it a few seconds it should be fine though.

first thing i learned today: i should have built logic that prevents you from starting before all fb data is fetched.

HN users seem to be much faster than my siblings...

I'm new here. what does R mean?

A statistical programming language that makes heavy use of NaNs.

It's a lonely world, and whenever I see hints, I secretly hope the person is an R user.

I failed pretty hard. 1/5

I don't have enough friends to even fail. 2/5 and then it alerted me I'd have to get more friends.

did you like the idea and exectution itself though?

SUPERcool!

Thank YOU!

More appropriate title: "Does Facebook know your friends better than you do?"

The answer: "Of course."

All of these are random facts about my friends I wouldn't bother to commit to memory. It doesn't say anything about me

My intent was that the results, albeit admittedly abstract, make you think about yourself. i believe who your friends are does say something about yourself (or at least provoke thoughts like: is it a coincidence that most of my friends are gemini?)

That's a fair suggestion and we changed the title accordingly.

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