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Meet the Programmer Behind Social Fixer
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.
Is there a SIGINT option?
Prepare for this to quit working in 3... 2... 1...
To ensure perfect aim, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target
Enough with fucking Facebook, I'm tired of hearing about this life-sucking website. When companies put facebook.com/company instead of company.com in their TV ads, you know something is fucked up.
Chances of me visiting company.com: 0 to 100% depending on my interest in the product.
Chances of me visiting Facebook.com/company: 0% since I have zero interest in Facebook.
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).
Advertise your own godamn website and stop giving more strength to Facebook.
I don't want to meet anyone involved with facebook anything at all.
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 messages and their pictures, static dropdown won't work here)
Tabs would be pictures with a tooltip to show name to save space, you could fit like, uh... 6-8 picture tabs depending on how fancy you made it look.
That would improve the chat for those that use it considerably because now it isn't some annoying pop-over crap that you accidentally click or have hovering over.
It would all be in one nice compact side-chat, which it should have been in the first place instead of the mess it is now. (same goes for Gmail chat, as well as any website chats!)
1. Invent thing that lots of people like
2. Turn down all offers to monetise it
3. Make sure everyone knows about step 2.
4. Wait for next biggest offer
5. Profit
Having fun trying to drain the ocean with that teaspoon?
--
BMO
I too despise facebook. But I have a way of making them pay. I created an account with them. My one and only account with them is only used for sites needing oAuth. I wonder how long it will be until facebook bans me for using them in such a way.
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 gone full circle. Actually, we've gone even further back. C-64 emulators are out there, and if I had my old code I could run it. Not only can FaceBook change its site any day, 20 years from now an emulator would be pointless because the code in and of itself is pointless--it's the massive database and public participation that matters.
When you're young (or retired and still interested) you can burn cycles on stuff like this. At this point in my life, I'm just way too prone to look at the scope of the project, consider the ability to defend it, and look at the long term... maybe that's a weakness; because it's really un-motivating given the climate we're in these days. 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.
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.
Don't effing use fbook et al.
I am pretty sure nobody cares.
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)
I find his character admirable. He is person who can't be simply bought off or influenced. He is the rare find that cannot be bought off with greed. Good for him!
This guy could be working on something creative with a Raspberry Pi or Arduino, or something as simple as contributing to an important open-source project. But no, he spends his nights working on a way to improve the interface of the world's largest and most effective surveillance and data-mining repository in history, known for their contempt for privacy, and does so without hesitation. Even when he did a better job than their in-house developers and was acknowledged as such, they didn't give a him a job which shows they don't really care much about his work, yet he still does it despite the fact Facebook's changes keep breaking his hacks.
All that brain power and effort going to waste on a fucking disgusting evil mega-corp. It's sick that he's happy about it.
Hey, nice to meet you. Oh, you write JavaScript code to fix a social networking site's interface? That's cool, that's cool... ...Bye now.
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.
butt Fuck Facebook.
'butt"
Hehe
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 Data users of the CMS, not for the edification or communication of the users. You aren't a total luser to use FB, because you want world-wide coverage to pick up your far flung friends. You pay to promote interesting stories, there should be a more social way to do that, to get topics exposed to a larger audience, like the page, but promotion of one topic. FB does get more exposure than most blogs, but it has a really bad UI.
Slash-dot is smart-ass shit, nasty, snarcky shit, and too much of it. An even better model for slash-dot's contextual reply is to collapse all the replies under each heading and encourage users to change the subject line when the thread changes. The USENET newagroup is a good model for handling the volume and the cruff, so slash-dot gets there, but not quite.
I think that FB will be gone in a year or two, or when the investors realize that the business model doesn't return on investment. When that happens Social Fixer can branch out as one of many UIs for a distributed CMS managed by others in the cloud, with only the global list of friends maintained by a global entity. FB will only survive in any form when the CMS and UI are unbundled. Then it will be possible to encourage users to behave differently. To require a comment when a user shares, for one, to change the zone layout so the news stream goes beyond the relatively little content now taken up entirely by the side panels when that content doesn't float, so the news fills the page, eventually. With stable content the style can become customized for several alternative layouts. Since Social Fixer has to cope with a quicksand foundation, it doesn't have the freedom it needs. Wrest the UI away from FB and enact features that shape better user behavior.