

Show HN: Portrit.com - My Visual Facebook Experience - Use Key HN - joneath
http://portrit.com/

======
joneath
It's been four months of hacking and now I am ready to show the world Portrit.
Portrit brings you your Facebook friends in visual experience. Portrit is all
about your friends photos and making the Facebook experience cleaner, quicker,
and more fun. Create a account at <http://portrit.com/create_account/> Use the
key HN. Limited supply!

I started working on Portrit because Facebook's photo service is junk and I
wanted something better. Originally this was a personal side project but it
has grown into my first startup! This is just a limited preview launch with
official public beta coming soon.

If you don't have a Facebook account or just don't trust me with you data :),
check out this blog post showing all the functionality of Portrit.
<http://blog.portrit.com/what-is-portrit>

*edit - I just upgrade everyone who made an account to Social. This key was supposed to give everyone this upgrade when you made an account...My Bad. The Social account lets you comment and like post as well as select favorite friends or hide friends.

~~~
bluespace
Wow this is pretty awesome. The photo perusing is quite fun with this UI.

In your Privacy Policy, you state that "We[you] only collect user analytics
data. " For being more open with data, could you create some page within your
application to report what bits of data you are storing about me?

~~~
joneath
I am using Google analytics to measure trafic as well as events. On the
backend I store the email address the user used to create their account, their
Facebook ID, favorite friend ID's, and hidden friend ID's. I wanted to be as
private with data as possible. 95% of the code runs client side and never
talks to the server.

I plan on updating both the privacy policy and the terms of service. I modeled
them off of Digg's but I am no lawyer, I am a hacker :).

------
naz
Your email validation code is too strict.

From Wikipedia:

    
    
      The local-part of the e-mail address may use any of these ASCII characters:
      Uppercase and lowercase English letters (a–z, A–Z)
      Digits 0 to 9
      Characters ! # $ % & ' * + - / = ? ^ _ ` { | } ~
      Character . (dot, period, full stop) provided that it is
      not the first or last character, and provided also that 
      it does not appear two or more times consecutively 
      (e.g. John..Doe@example.com).

~~~
joneath
Thanks, I will update the regex in the next release.

~~~
chrisbroadfoot
You should use the HTML5 email field:

[http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-
work/multipage/...](http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-
work/multipage/states-of-the-type-attribute.html#e-mail-state)

------
mustpax
Very well designed, would be especially delightful on an iPad type device.

Using Chrome on a Mac though, nothing happens when I click on images from my
feed. I'd expect that to at least preview a larger version, or maybe take me
to the post itself.

~~~
joneath
There is actually optimized versions for iPad and mobile (iPhone and Android).

The photos in the feed do not open larger at this point. Still trying to work
the black magic that is the Facebook API. The cursor pointer is some dev code
that made it through to production be accident, whoops!

------
zoudini
If I try searching for a friend by using their last name (easier in this
case), it starts to match the name in the autocomplete but drops out once I've
typed the full name for some reason...

also probably not a typical use case for names, but I do have FB friends that
go by their middle names although their facebook profile has their full name..
can't search for them using middle name in autocomplete search

~~~
zoudini
I forgot to say, awesome work and I like the visual look and feel and it does
feel snappier than the real FB but still don't see why I should use it...
maybe I don't "get" it?

~~~
joneath
Thanks for the feedback. At the moment there are not many differentiating
features compared to Facebook, but I have a bunch planned. There are a lot
cool things you can do when you are a intermediary between the user and all
their Facebook data.

My guess is the target demographic is younger women or just women in general.
Not to sound sexist but in my experience women browse Facebook photos in a
much higher degree than males.

------
chrisbroadfoot
Is there any purpose in having a sign-up? If you're already linked to the
user's Facebook account, isn't this enough?

Is it not a one-to-one relationship between Portrit and FB account?

The UI for 'likes' is confusing. The icon seemed very foreign, and the whole
idea of putting profile pictures of people who have liked the post on the
right isn't intuitive either.

~~~
joneath
The login is it limit the amount of users. This is what the key is for. When
we officially launch this will be removed.

I agree that the like icon could use some work. The idea behind showing
profile pictures of likes instead of names is one of the main ideas of
Portrit. We are trying to limit the amount of text and promote discovery that
may not have happened if the name was shown. We will look into making this
action more intuitive.

Thanks for the feedback.

------
KevBurnsJr
Great interface. Please add anchor titles to primary navigation buttons so I
can figure out what they do by hovering before I click on them.

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maheshs
Looks great!!! but what would be the business model?

~~~
ritonlajoie
Yep, nice nice UI !! Bravo. So, about this business model ? :)

------
Satinel
Possible bug. I see two profile picture for each friend for every alphabet. Am
using Chrome 7.0.536.2.

~~~
joneath
I checked and this is the dev version of chrome right? The dev version has
JavaScript errors in the Jquery library. I am looking into why this is.
Thanks.

------
reedlaw
Mine is stuck with a loading image. Server too busy or does it take a while to
initialize?

------
rokhayakebe
Too bad I do not have a FB account, but the screenshots look awesome. The
stream page is kinda taking away from it, imo. I would focus 100% on photos.

~~~
yesbabyyes
I agree with this. It seems to me that Facebook puts most focus on the feed
and that's hard to compete with. Flipboard has a nice take on this -
unfortunately, locked in an app instead of on the web.

You have done a great job with the rest, navigation, and image browsing. There
were a few glitches, the user info box and posts in the feed with images in
them could use some finish.

All in all, great job and I think I understand where you're going with this!

