
Show HN: Profile Collage for Facebook - nmb
http://www.profilecollage.com/
======
geuis
Couple of quick things.

1) You don't need permission to post to my wall or get all of my information
to sample my images. I, and others, will explicitly not try this specifically
for this reason. Only request the minimum of what you need.

2) Your FB Connect implementation appears to be broken. Clicking on the
<http://profilecollage.appspot.com/auth/login> takes the user to a mostly
empty page with a FB image that you have to click into again, which then takes
you to the authentication page.

3) Clicking 'dont allow' on the permissions request button just keeps circling
back to the request page. This should redirect somewhere else.

~~~
beaumartinez
I wish I could say this to each and every Facebook app developer.

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nmb
A few friends and I made this web app yesterday (our first!) instead of
studying for finals. You provide a reasonably high-quality photo, and it helps
you make a Facebook profile like the ones shown on the landing page. It's
definitely not everything we wish it were (due to limitations in GAE and the
python Facebook API library), but we're proud of it for the amount of time it
took us to make it and definitely plan to iterate on it. Let us know if you
have feedback, or find this useful at all.

Thanks, Nish

~~~
nailer
This looked really exciting before I used it, but has taken me one hour so
far, and been fairly frustrating.

First getting my eyes inside the area took a bucketload of image cropping and
editing. You don't even have guidelines to help me so it was trial and error.

Then, tagging from 5 to 1 still isn't reproducing the images in order. I've
tried multiple times.

~~~
BluePoints
If this were automated it would be better... I agree. 2 hard to complete.

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nailer
1\. Yep, if not face recognition, then let me use the arrows to move the
picture up and down.

2\. They can fix this with better instructions. I finally un-tagged and re-
tagged all my pics without from 5 to 1 without re-uploading them to get the
correct order.

3 (new). I forgot to say thank you. I was having trouble with the app and I
should have been more gentlemanly. Sorry.

Thank you! This was good for a beta and the results look OK with some
fiddling.

~~~
nmb
Ah, didn't see this post. Glad you finally got it working! Do you think it
would have been more clear to suggest that users upload the album, save it,
and then proceed to tag themselves?

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joe_the_user
I wish I could say that I've seen a profile like this that looked good...

But I haven't.

Your blood-shot eyes staring back at me just doesn't say "this is an awesome
design". It mostly screams you were more excited by realizing you could do
this ... than you ever thought about whether I'd want to see your eyes in
particular.

\-------------------

Personally, I do wish fb would allow enough customization so people could
create _good_ looking like this...

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edanm
Haven't tried it, planning to do so tomorrow.

One quick tip - this is an incredibly easy-to-explain and visual webapp. You
have _a lot_ of text on your home page, which can be pretty much replaced with
3 pictures. I don't know what your plan is for this, but if you want it to go
viral and get lots of publicity, you'll definitely want to get rid of all the
text and replace it with images.

~~~
nmb
I agree with you; my co-developers had different opinions. I think we will
move to less text, more pictures, though. Thanks for your feedback!

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bobf
It would be great if you implemented a crop/preview feature, so the user could
line things up properly instead of having to manually loop through
editing/submiting until a decent result is achieved.

~~~
epiphany47
This is Jeff from the Profile Collage dev team.

You asked for it HN, so we'll show you a preview of the upcoming UI:
<http://fromjeffrey.com/pc/>

Features: \- Live Preview \- Translate (Move) \- Rotate \- Resize

This is 110% an alpha build and the UI def. has to be more intuitive (like
rotate is based on mouse drag in X-axis, but how does the user know that??)

Uses processingjs to do the heavy lifting with PHP backend - still getting out
of memory errors with large pictures, so try to start with something
reasonable (IE: not 5 megapixels dimensions 2000px and smaller recommended)

Have fun and please leave comments! =D

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Timothee
I really think the use of the pictures in the new profile is an interesting
"hack", but I wish this was used for more than just spreading your face over
them in the same way. It was a good idea to use these smaller pictures for
something, now the something needs to be expanded a bit.

That being said, good job on getting something up and running that fast! It's
indeed the right time to do it.

~~~
nmb
Oh yeah, I definitely agree with you. However, we only spent two days on it
and didn't have time to come up with more creative uses.

Thanks for the kind words and the feedback!

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PStamatiou
Nice! Just did it on mine:
<http://dl.dropbox.com/u/186198/Screenshots/ekuo.png>

using a cropped version of this photo (had to crop it a few times to get the
eyes to align properly) <http://dl.dropbox.com/u/186198/Screenshots/i_kx.png>

~~~
nmb
Looks awesome! =) It's so fulfilling to see my procrastination going to good
use!

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ajhai
I made a similar facebook app a couple of days back
(<http://apps.facebook.com/collage-frnds/>). It creates a collage of your
profile picture using your friends profile pictures. It failed to catch
attention as the app itself is very slow since it is hosted on a shared
server.

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nrbafna
On similar lines, I tried out an album hack.

<http://goo.gl/OPNzq>

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alex_h
It seems that, depending on the amount of profile info on your profile. (Lives
in X, went to school at Y, etc.) The small photos may not be exactly aligned
with the main pic. I'm not sure if there is any way to control for that.

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Haunschild
I build a little website which also lets you create thees kinds of porfile
pictures. bonus: \- it has a live preview \- drag & drop \- zoom

<http://picscatter.com/>

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nollidge
Cool idea.

a) How robust is this to different screen resolutions? Is my grandma's 800x600
display going to be all wonky?

b) Will my avatar just be a sliver of cheek, then?

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citricsquid
Facebook use fixed width for profile pages.

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nmb
Yep. There are actually a few cases in which our cropping algorithm will fail,
but few people have complained about those cases so far. When we have more
time we plan to make the algorithm more robust.

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nmb
Sorry guys, we've exceeded our app engine quota. Check back in three hours!

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dchen
for the more subversive folks out there, check out an automated way to do this
to your friends: <http://apps.facebook.com/bannerbuzz>

~~~
nmb
Hm, not sure that I would use this personally, but I can't deny that it is a
creative use of the new layout. Thanks for the link, it's interesting to see
what others are doing with this!

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rebel
ProfileGen.com is in my opinion a much easier version

~~~
nmb
Thanks for the info! There are many many usability things that we didn't get
around to implementing due to restrictions in App Engine's and Facebook's
python APIs, but we plan to make the flow more pleasant in future iterations.

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huytoan
Sorry but this app is lame compared to
<http://apps.facebook.com/beautyprofile/>

~~~
topherjaynes
Constructive comments include details, besides vague adjectives.

Your only two comments on HN are about beautyprofile. Are you involved with
it? Not a good way to get PR then.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=huytoan>

