
Show HN: Firefeed - A Twitter clone built with Firebase - jamest
http://firefeed.io
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jimrhoskins
In case anyone is confused, it requires Facebook, so if you block FB, it will
be pretty much an empty page with some footer links. I assumed it had crashed.
But they assumed I allowed facebook.

Might be good to have something show up in case you can't reach facebook.

~~~
graue
Wow, second Show HN posted today that does that:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4944334>

I hope this isn't a trend.

~~~
mayop100
This is a technology demo. We wanted to demo our real-time tech rather than
show a bunch of sign-up workflow code. Facebook auth lets us save a bunch of
boring code.

~~~
graue
Would it be much more code to support Twitter's OAuth as well? That'd appease
me... everything on my Twitter is public and they have a much better record
with regard to user data than Facebook. Plus your demo is a Twitter clone, so
you'd get points for irony :)

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anant
We built Firefeed to show how easy it is to build realtime apps with Firebase.
We've put up a detailed explanation of how we built it on the about page:
<http://firefeed.io/about.html>

The code is all open source and on Github, please feel free to fork and reuse
the project. Pull requests are welcome!

~~~
ahoy
The option to log in without requiring FB would be nice.

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vidarh
Firebase looks really cool, but my first impression the moment I see that you
end up building everything in a way where it is tightly coupled to the servers
of a startup that does not have years of profitability yet (or even published
pricing), is that there's no way I'd put anything but toy/demo's on it for a
_long_ time.

It _seems_ like the type of thing that'd do great with the option of a self-
hosted server, and it also seems like the type of thing that'll see open
source clones of pretty quickly, though. But I'd actually be vastly more
comfortable paying Firebase to host my apps if I knew there was an open source
fallback for their server component.

~~~
jamest
[Firebase founder] Thanks for the feedback! We're definitely aware that it's a
concern. Hopefully we can go a little way towards winning your trust by
showing you the great apps built on us by larger companies (happening soon)
and by giving you the best customer service we possibly can. And, hey, toys
are a good starting place too.

Regarding pricing, you can find it here:
<https://www.firebase.com/pricing.html>

Pricing is difficult and we're trying to get it right. Your feedback would be
great.

~~~
blackhole
I almost never use Facebook to log into anything, and vastly prefer using
twitter as my catch-all account. You absolutely must put in a real account
system as an alternative to Facebook if this is going to take off.

~~~
anant
We currently provide convenience SDKs to login with Facebook, Twitter and just
a regular email/password, but the system is flexible enough to allow any
authentication mechanism that can produce JWTs.

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ozgune
Going through the GitHub repository at firebase/firefeed right now. This looks
pretty slick for 500 lines of code.

~~~
mayop100
Please feel free to tinker, fork, send pull requests, etc! It's all open
source.

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retube
Sign in with Facebook - nope

~~~
bryogenic
It would be refreshing to see a twitter clone that was a free-for-all w.r.t.
pseudonyms. Post as anyone and then if you want to register a name you link it
to email/fb/twitter.

~~~
anant
Fork the code and roll your own! You can even host it on Github pages, since
it's all static content.

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nodesocket
Anybody else getting error connecting?

    
    
        ➜  ~  curl --head http://firefeed.io/about.html 
        HTTP/1.0 503 Service Unavailable
        Server: squid/3.1.14
        Mime-Version: 1.0
        Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2012 01:33:50 GMT
        Content-Type: text/html
        Content-Length: 3542
        X-Squid-Error: ERR_DNS_FAIL 0
        Vary: Accept-Language
        Content-Language: en
        X-Cache: MISS from row44proxy-postauth
        Via: 1.0 row44proxy-postauth (squid/3.1.14)
        Connection: keep-alive

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riffic
neat. Can I be the first to recommend that you peruse the federation specs
(OStatus/Tent.io, also there is a w3 working group mailing list
<http://www.w3.org/community/fedsocweb/>) and try to solve the silo/walled
garden issue?

to elaborate, I think there is a huge future in what I call _Status Update
Services_ , and I think the trend will be for organizations to move away from
the incumbent service providers towards infrastructure under their own control
(as in the e-mail model.)

~~~
anant
Thanks, that is good feedback!

We're working on supporting multiple auth providers, but the larger question
of federation is more interesting, and equally harder. We're not sure about
where to take Firefeed yet, since it was built as a demo for Firebase, but
that's something we'll definitely consider in the future.

~~~
riffic
Cool, happy I'm giving helpful feedback. The field is just starting to take
off, but I think it's great that there is now a growing selection of small
message/status update/microblog software.

It's possible that government agencies, universities, businesses, etc can take
advantage of running status update services, which can be made either be
public or private, tied to their own domain/network, and maintain
administration of user accounts. Many other advantages from having this sort
of infrastructure develop will be seen as well.

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SquareWheel
Does it really require Facebook to use? Don't really want to create an account
just to see what this is all about.

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nodesocket
Great job FireBase team. Think I am going to try this for the
<http://commando.io> status feed. Simply host on my CDN. Would love to have
GitHub auth as well though.

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dutchbrit
Seems to be down here unfortunately. Would love to see this!

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JungleGymSam
I only see a stripe at the top and two links at the bottom (which are also
very near the top of the page). Using Chrome.

~~~
anant
This will happen if the Facebook SDK couldn't be loaded. Perhaps you have a
script blocker running?

I've filed an issue to fix this -
<https://github.com/firebase/firefeed/issues/3>

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binarybits
Very nice.

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wushupork
this is brilliant

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northisup
apparently not webscale?

