Meet the Programmer Behind Social Fixer 64
Ars Technica profiles Matt Kruse, the developer behind Social Fixer. "Social Fixer uses JavaScript to modify Facebook's interface. It gives you dozens of options for customizing how you see Facebook: you can separate updates into tabs, enable mouse-over image previews, change the layout, filter posts from your friends, give everything a theme and even hide the bits you find disagreeable. It's a huge amount of work to keep going, but although Kruse has a tiny Paypal donations button on the bottom of his website to cover his expenses, he says he hasn't made any efforts to profit from it, despite being contacted several times by people who sniffed money to be made. ... So far, he's turned them all down. 'There was one person a while ago who seemed pretty promising,' he says. His tone is gently bemused, as if not quite believing that people actually want to pay money for his work. 'I've had ten offers over the past four years from people who say they want to add advertising inside it or attach some additional software to the installer. But the way they wanted to implement it technically would have put my users at risk of them being malicious, so I couldn't do that.'"
It would be nice if every piece of software and every website with ads thought the same way.
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Facebook is shit, and I presume your product is shit.
Well, it a grand effort to fix the shit that is FB's UI. And that is moving shit!
I have favorably compared what slash-dot does with contextual reply, to FB's failed effort. But slash-dot is shit too, just different shit. FB is stupid shit, ordinarily stupid people posting echo-chamber-like stuff that FB's investors love because they can snoop on its users. Shit is the main, mature market, and that is what FB is. The problems with FBs UI that Social Fixer tries to fix is that it is intended for the Big Da
SIGINT? (Score:5, Funny)
Is there a SIGINT option?
inevitably... (Score:2)
Re:inevitably... (Score:5, Informative)
features break every time facebook updates their interface, but they're usually fixed in short order. I've been using it for years, and it does make the experience less annoying.
Re:Stop it already (Score:5, Funny)
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Slashdot is open to all types of people, and even Slashdotters are prone to narcissism (which Facebook encourages, hence is so prevalent with).
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Slashdot is open to all types of people, and even Slashdotters are prone to narcissism (which Facebook encourages, hence is so prevalent with).
You're thinking of Twitter. Facebook is for people enamored with their food and the ability to post pictures of it. Which Social Fixer lets you create a tab just for them.
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Slashdot is open to all types of people, and even Slashdotters are prone to narcissism (which Facebook encourages, hence is so prevalent with).
You're thinking of Twitter. Facebook is for people enamored with their food and the ability to post pictures of it. Which Social Fixer lets you create a tab just for them.
You're thinking of Instagram, which Facebook owns. So I guess you're still right.
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2 out of 3 ACs agree - Facebook is shit and we're not going to take it anymore.
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When companies put facebook.com/company instead of company.com in their TV ads, you know something is fucked up.
Wait, wait, I thought it was aol.com/company. No wonder that doesn't work anymore.
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Pretty much goes without saying. The surest way to build a billion-dollar empire is by emulating everything the last billion-dollar empire did except for the mistake that brought it down.
Trouble is, you eventually become the monster you fight. Ask Microsoft, for instance.
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I wish companies would just grow some fucking balls and ditch Facebook. And I'm not suggesting moving to the next fucking fad either (MySpace, LinkedIn, etc).
MySpace was the fad before Facebook.
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So was LinkedIn for that matter too.
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I installed this (Score:1)
I just installed this recently to help the few times where I actually use that crap site to get around quicker.
I can safely say I will be throwing a little money his way soon, very good stuff.
If there were any additions, it would be a completely redesigned chat, but that is going to require quite a bit more effort to rewrite.
Preferably a chat that was entirely vertical and "menu"-tabbed (as in, an HTML dropdown menu to select other tabs if there are too many chats open, HTML to actually show who sent messag
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why don't you just go the "Messages" section and select your desired convos from the list on the left? You could just turn off the pop-up chat entirely. I rarely use those little pop-up boxes. I either go to the messages section, or reply on my phone.
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It is mainly convenience because say if I am running through the faceboke feed and someone messages me, easier to just type crap to them and continue scrolling while my life crawls out my eyeballs.
I used to use messages, but if say I was having a long-term conversation, Facebook just sits there chugging away at memory like crazy on the messages page for some silly reason. It is so leaky for me.
I remember leaving it open over night by accident and waking to 1.2gig messages tab.
Lucky it is easy to terminate
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Having fun trying to drain the ocean with that teaspoon?
--
BMO
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Don't effing use fbook et al.
I am pretty sure nobody cares.
Facebook Is for oAuth (Score:2)
Re:Facebook Is for oAuth (Score:5, Insightful)
Doing that just legitimizes the practice of sites requiring sign-in from an external social media account. At the very least use OpenID wherever possible.
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The kind of thing you can do when young (Score:1)
I could never do this now, even if I cared about FB. When I was younger, the fact that all my C-64 code would be gone with the wind when something better came along didn't bother met that much. As time has gone by, systems that can run decently without assembly are around, there are many excellent cross-platform libraries, and I developed a good understanding of what it takes to write cross-platform applications.
With this guy's entire app being based on FaceBook (and he's certainly not the only one) we've
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I find myself becoming more interested in literary endeavors; knowing that English has a longer shelf-life than JavaScript or even C, and will be appreciated by a lot more people.
Despite the shelf-life of English, very few of us could write English that would be appreciated by more people than this guys JavaScript. You are more likely to get more appreciation by writing the next Angry Birds than you are to become the next Shakespeare.
F.B. Purity (Score:4, Informative)
I've been using FB Purity (http://www.fbpurity.com/) which is pretty much the same idea. My favorite feature is to hide stories that match a list of regular expressions. That's a great way to stop hearing about a particular TV show or sports league that several friends like to go on about.
Re:F.B. Purity (Score:5, Informative)
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Thanks! Honestly, I use FB Purity because it's the one I ran into first. It did all that I needed, so I never looked for other solutions. I'll make a point of trying yours.
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I had that feature longer before FB Purity. He may have been inspired by my implementation ;)
I went from FB Purity to FB Fixer. Good software, thanks (I'm a donor... although not a big one).
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Two new UIDs arguing over who was first.
I was. There were 400 thousand people before me, but still.
Now get off Slashdot (our lawn).
Settle in court if you wish. We'll bring the popcorn.
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I stopped using FB Purity when the developer announced that they would be ceasing development because of something that Facebook did. I guess they didn't stop, but now I'm using Social Fixer and I'm not going back.
Something like this for Youtube? (Score:2, Interesting)
Something like this for Youtube?
I really wish to filter things like:
"Youtube recommends some crap"
" comment on"
" liked n videos"
" added n videos to crap-orites"
I don't want to know about things that some loser likes on YT.
(and indeed this is a real question, Thanks)
Rare Find (Score:3)
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It seems an easy decision, to be fair.
He's developed an interface that removes annoying Facebook shit. A third-party wants to buy it and put their annoying shit in instead. Kind of defeats the purpose. Who is going to use it if all it's giving you more of the same, just a different company?
Re:Disappointing (Score:5, Interesting)
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It's narcissism and egotism encapsulated into one site,
What is, Slashdot? Oh, you were talking about Facebook.
We have some of the great and talented programmers working on marketing, advertising and data-mining. We need less of that shit in the world as it is, and more towards solving real, worthwhile problems.
Let peace begin with you. Stop whining about facebook, and go solve some real, worthwhile problems.
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All *your* wonderful brain power and effort going to a rant on slashdot about a guy and his personal project.
If only this worked on the iOS app (Score:2)
I generally have less of a beef with the web version of FB than I do with the iOS app which is a colossal piece of crap. Give me something that lets me turn off all the damn ads.