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Show HN: Facebook Open Graph Redirect Chrome Extension

by jodoglevy on 6/24/12, 5:55 PM with 25 comments

• by nikcub on 6/24/12, 9:41 PM

  This is probably the 12th such Chrome plugin we have seen now. We released ours a couple of days after frictionless sharing was announced.

  The extension gets complicated when you attempt to get it working for all variety of apps, because app developers are constantly updating the DOM to bypass our filters.

  See this previous thread for details when another one of these was announced:

  http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3810897

  see our original project and the code we have so far to getting this to work with other social apps:

  https://github.com/byoogle/frictionless

  I really wish we could have one project that works in all cases, rather than 12 projects that work in 5% of cases.

  We are catching around 50% of cases at the moment with this code:

  https://github.com/byoogle/frictionless/blob/master/webkit/f...

  but it is moving all the time. I am currently in the process of writing a generic rule engine that can be updated from outside of the extension (compare this to just searching on uiconnect.php in links).

  Feel free to fork and contribute to existing code (I can't imagine that one of these previous projects wouldn't have come up if you Google searched).

• by jack7890 on 6/24/12, 6:35 PM

  The article says that Facebook forces you to install the publisher's app when you click one of these links, but that isn't actually true. It's up to the publisher whether or not they want to prompt for an install to view the content. This is what Facebook calls authenticated referrals: http://goo.gl/CQld3

• by altrego99 on 6/24/12, 6:13 PM

  I would imagine that this can be easily converted into a GreaseMonkey userscript. Since you have chosen to implement this for Chrome, the question which naturally comes to my mind is - is it even easier to write these addons for Chrome than writing an userscript?

  Firefox user here, considering to switch for some time.

• by munchor on 6/24/12, 6:46 PM

  This is very good, thank you! I usually just copy the text and search it on Google to find the real article.

• by citricsquid on 6/24/12, 6:23 PM

  Most aren't stupid enough to lose traffic from people refusing to install their app so if you hit "No" or "Close" most will redirect you to the article anyway. The alternative is to set it to "only me" in the dropdown on who can see what you read.

• by thenonsequitur on 7/5/12, 7:28 AM

  Whenever I encounter one of these articles, I just google the title. Easy enough for me.

• by kcbanner on 6/24/12, 6:07 PM

  This is great!

• by Albuca on 6/24/12, 6:17 PM

  I'm glad to see that this was created! There has definitely been more than one time where I had a friend who read an article that interested me, hit the "install app page" and closed the tab.

  This is just another example of Facebook wanting to collect more and more and more data about us.

  Ever since Facebook got more and more involved with the "app" fad, I used it less and less. Currently it tells me when events are, birthdays, and occasionally I'll browse some friends and see what's new.

  Facebook left my focal point of browsing a long time ago, what about you?