

Show HN: PinView - Your Facebook Feed as a Pinterest View - ThomPete
https://apps.facebook.com/pinviewer/

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ThomPete
Click anywhere on that page to start your own feed.

A friend of mine and me have been playing around with some ideas about how to
show the Facebook feed differently.

Our first experiment is called PinView and basically takes the Pinterest GUI
an apply it to your Facebook feed.

We don't track any personal info. The permissions you are asked to grant are
purely to be able to represent your own feed in the app.

Wo do of course monitor traffic.

The entire app is done in JavaScript so everything runs on your own machine.
It's no secret that we had to make a lot of hacks to get this working fairly
well. FB is definitely not an easy animal to tame.

If you have any kind of data blocker activated that should be deactivated to
play with it.

Let us know your thoughts.

You can also give feedback (or like) here:
[https://www.facebook.com/pages/Pin-View-
Community/3301634270...](https://www.facebook.com/pages/Pin-View-
Community/330163427034730)

~~~
why-el
Hey do you guys plan on sharing how you did this? I'm particulary interested
in those tweaks you mentioned about to make the stream work. I have some ideas
for my news feed but could get off the ground.

~~~
ThomPete
Sure. We will write a post about it soon.

~~~
why-el
Perfect. Which blog? You have quiet a few. :)

~~~
ThomPete
hehe yes. 000fff.org it will get a long awaited revival with lots of stuff
there.

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citricsquid
I like the idea but I don't think it works well as an alternative to the
current Facebook display. For me my timeline is very much based on time, so
when someone has a status "going to dinner at x" it matters that it's
displayed _before_ "dinner was great", if it's displayed along side it doesn't
make much sense. It works great for photos (and friends) though, it's
definitely a cool way to display content just maybe not text.

I think pinterest type displays work for photos etc because it's a way of
presenting a lot of content at once that specific items can catch the users
eye and they can look at further, that can't happen with text, you have to
read it all.

~~~
ThomPete
You are totally right. That was our finding too.

We wanted to try it anyway and just put it out there.

The cool thing is that now we have a pretty good idea how the FB feed works
and can now experiment with our little js engine.

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flyosity
As someone who is pretty much totally checked out of Facebook and logs in
_maybe_ once a month, this might actually get me to check out my timeline
more. I love browsing it visually, awesome job!

~~~
ThomPete
Thnx m8.

It has potential for sure but as others say. Text is a challenge which we have
tried to deal with a little bit.

~~~
larrys
Let me know if you need help securing the domain pinview.com for this.

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elana
Hi ThomPete, I write for 10,000 Words and would love to talk to you a bit more
about Pin View for a post. Could you email me at elanazak@gmail.com?

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nickler
Get ready for volume. This will blow up fast. I'm willing to bet you get a
call from FB shortly to either shut it down, or buy it outright.

Nice work.

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GuiA
Cool concept and execution, but my Facebook timeline is very text driven—
which makes the PinView render not very readable.

~~~
ThomPete
Yeah it's def best if you have lots of pictures.

We have tried to make it as visual as possible. But all feeds are different :)

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noinput
Well done. One more way to realize everyone in my social circle is boring, but
well done.

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methoddk
This isn't working for me in Safari. It does work in Chrome, however, and it
looks good!

~~~
ThomPete
Ok looking into it. Safari is not as FB friendly :)

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gee_totes
On chrome, if there is a post with a bunch of comments at the bottom of the
screen, I click on it and the post appears in the lightbox, but the comments
get cut off (I can't scroll down).

Just FYI. Looks great, by the way!

~~~
ThomPete
Thnx. We are looking into solving this.

There are many little quirks that are quite hard to catch until they happen.

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zachallia
no infinite scroll! hard to make this view look good with things other than
photos, but looks pretty good

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paradox95
<http://friendsheet.com>

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iambot
Hahaha sign in with Facebook details and no preview or description what so
ever - no thanks.

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zachallia
mark zuckerberg signed in and liked it with no preview, why wouldn't you?

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OoTheNigerian
I'll put the name of the activity on top of the image. e.g, "Jane shared this
picture" before the picture. Make it more 'readable'in my opinion.

Perfect as a tablet app. not sure it will fly on the desktop or mobile phone.

~~~
ThomPete
Yes that might work better.

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wseymour
Am I the only one who thinks PinFace is a better name?

~~~
ThomPete
Believe me we tried other combinations but Face and Book are not accessible so
we can't call an app anything like PinBook og Faceterest :)

