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.

Comments

Stop it already

[Anonymous Coward]

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.