Displaying Facebook content as one of filters on the left side #3009
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I don't think our current system actually currently supports this, but it sounds like an interesting feature request. Feel free to take this to the Diaspora-Discuss mailing list! :) |
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facebook has an api for that, eg gwibber uses it. I also think that this may be another killer-feature ;) |
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I really agree with this feature like @memarko said this can bring more users, and really help "populate" the diaspora news feed with relevant content, someone began to develop this ? |
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It's an interesting idea in theory, but I don't think it's all that clean in practice. I've tested this out on Friendica, and it kind of mashes posts together in a really weird way (Facebook posts are indistinguishable from distributed network posts). It's weird, because it kind of spams the user with a sort of distorted sense of what the community is, and it'd suck to have users migrating over to totally drown out the voices of our terrific community with a bunch of Facebook posts. I'm still open to the idea, but it needs a bit of thinking so as not to clutter up an individual user's stream with irrelevance to the community that user is a part of. |
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Aol lifestream have done this with relative success, i have done some specific tests with the facebook javascript sdk and works, (i get the last 50 videos posted in facebook user timeline and store in mongodb ), what are your worries in specific about this ? |
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"what are your worries in specific about this ?" I guess my concerns are largely just semantic ones. I don't think that aggregating in other social services into a stream is particularly conducive to a Diaspora community. If anything, Facebook is pretty spammy. If User A were to enable such a connector, their stream would be loaded full of Facebook posts all the time, which could potentially drown out many posts of value available on Diaspora simply because they might be more interested in the Facebook-centric posts. You could make the argument that "well, they could be filtered out like the Aspects in the stream", and while that's true enough, Friendica does something like that and it's not really an ideal solution. If anything, the "multi-service" stream is kind of a fragmented UX concept, IMHO. It's not particularly usable, and can really get in the way. Additionally, I'm not sure they we'd want such a tool just for the sake of "Driving up adoption." I'm willing to keep an open mind about it, but I've seen an implementation of this before, and it always just strikes me as a sort of jarring, uneven experience. You can almost say it turns into a semantic argument of "Diaspora as its own platform vs. Diaspora as a Social Aggregator". I guess if anyone's interested in making a pull request for it, we'll take a look at least. |
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Hi everyone. I need this bug/feature so much that I'm willing to pay 100.00 bucks for it. If anyone else would like to throw in a few bucks to elevate the priority on this issue, you should check out FreedomSponsors! |
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Side Note: @pravi you can hire someone to fork DIASPORA and have this feature on your pod, if you wish. That's the magic of open-source. |
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@tubbo excellent way to piss off a contributor! |
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@pravi whoa, sorry man. probably should've checked up on that :) there's been a lot of spam on github recently. my fault... |
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@tubbo apologies accepted. But even if it was a spam, it doesn't warrant closing an issue like this. Anyway, lets move on. |
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This feature is often requested: #2174, http://diaspora.shapado.com/questions/what-does-connect-to-facebook-do, https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/diaspora-dev/Xs6T9FvXAM0, https://getsatisfaction.com/diaspora/topics/twitter_facebook_stream. I believe it will be a big benefit for diaspora to be able to display facebook updates if the user wants to. This will make people feel much more comfortable transitioning from facebook. @DeadSuperHero I see what you mean. Facebook seems very spammy to me too. But I believe the user has to be able to decide the degree of 'spamminess' on his own. It may be useful to let the user subscribe to some of his facebook contacts' updates while skipping others. |
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A few concerns with this; keep in mind that I'm not against such a feature, 1.) Is this something pods with lots of users will be able to handle? I've 2.) As we're trying to move away from networks like Facebook, do we really 3.) Does Facebook's TOS allow this? |
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As long as we give podmins and users the choice of enabling it or not, this isn't super offensive to me. Large pods should be able to turn the feature off if performance suffers, while smaller pods can have additional features since they aren't under as much heavy load, and therefore won't be affected by the additional load. But again, I question why we need this in the trunk of DIASPORA? It seems like a feature that a certain community of people want, but it doesn't really have much to do with the project itself. I still don't believe people will use DIASPORA over Facebook to browse Facebook... |
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Regarding 2.) It may be just as bad in terms of privacy as using Facebook directly, because one certainly has to have an account on Facebook and authorize oneself there. But the same problem is also relevant to cross-posting. I think what we need is some lightweight stream which would give users an idea of what is going on at Facebook (especially directly related to what they've posted from diaspora), so that they don't have to check 2 sites. But if they want to interact with people on facebook, they would probably have to do it there... Regarding 3.) I'm not a lawyer, can't say anything certain here. But here's what I've found, it's under the "3. Safety" chapter of the TOS:
As usual, extremely rough wording... I hope they don't mean that using their API is illegal. |
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@yurkobb IIRC, we can pull Facebook posts without saving anything to the database, i would personally be in favor of that. there's no need to duplicate data, especially since Facebook has a dead simple means of pulling your data directly from them. I think the greater problem is what you've just mentioned, that people are going to have to "talk back" on Facebook.com anyway, so what problem is this really solving? |
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I think that the problem is that people tend to think that "facebook integration" means "post to facebook and see updates from facebook". Of course we shouldn't make DIASPORA a Facebook client, that would be a stupid thing to do. But i think we need some way to allow people to see the most important bits of their facebook stream in diaspora if we allow them to post to facebook from diaspora. Also I was pleasantly impressed when diaspora once notified me when my wife sent me a personal message on facebook. EDIT: Well, actually she did just post an update on DIASPORA with a link to my facebook page and I misinterpreted that as an automated diaspora notification. |
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My 2 cents ; It is possible to add to Diaspora the functionnality of Gwibber, so like a Facebook client. |
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@Flaburgan I see what you mean. I mostly agree with you. But I think that there's a problem that DIASPORA* calls the cross-posting functionality "connecting with Facebook". I think many newcomers expected "connect with Facebook" to be some kind of two-way integration. But it only allows to post text status updates to facebook. We need to either rename that function into something like "enable facebook cross-posting", or we can think of some lightweight Facebook stream aggregation functionality. The sole purpose of such hypothetical aggregation functionality would be to free diaspora* users from the need to check two websites each time. But if they want to interact with the people on Facebook, they would still need to either go to Facebook or to invite their friends to Diaspora*. Integrating Facebook with Diaspora in some deeper way would be against the idea why Diaspora was created: to have an open source, decentralized and privacy-respecting social networking solution (if that's correct). Diaspora will still remain an alternative to Facebook rather than a handy extension. |
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If it's a case of allowing people to see a bit of their Facebook stream on the same page as their Diaspora stream, but not integrated into the Diaspora stream itself, would it be possible to write a little JS widget to do this? If done in the right way, this would place the load on the user's terminal and shouldn't place extra load on the pod server. There are widgets which do this for Twitter. I don't know whether this would solve the issue to the satisfaction of those who want it. |
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No, no, no, no. Thanks for reading |
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@goobertron Very good idea! |
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Hi everyone, I recently started discussing some kind of integration of twitter streams with some friends I share a diaspora instance with. Could someone point me to the widget for twitter stream integration? I would like to have similar features as discussed here for facebook for twitter. I would prefer to read my twitter stream and my twitter notifications through diaspora (via filters called #mytwitterstream #mytwitternotifications on the left side). That way, as a user: I exactly know what comes from twitter and what out of the diaspora network. I would also like to decide which diaspora posts should also be published on my twitter account via an aspect called twitter. And an amazing killer-feature would be, if I could decide to reshare and to reply to a message of my twitter stream only in my diaspora network or in both twitter and diaspora. Shall I open a new issue for this on github, a discussion on loomio, are there already some? Could some experienced diaspora developer estimate the effort to implement what I described? I would love to help by coding a first version and then iterating it in pull request discussions. |
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@Saheba we do not integrate content from twitter or facebook in diaspora, we allow to post from diaspora* to these networks. |
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Hi @Saheba, me again! I'm not a developer, but I'm fairly sure that (a) there is general agreement that some form of integration of Twitter feeds into Diaspora's stream would be an acceptable/good idea, and that (b) the blocker up to this point to implementing it has been that Diaspora does not yet have a solid API in order to authorise such integration. It is currently possible to cross-post from Diaspora to FB,Twitter, Tumblr and Wordpress, but this uses the APIs of those services. I believe that in order to cross-post from those services to Diaspora, Diaspora needs its own API for authorisation. A draft API for authorisation has been created in #4554, but there remains work to be done in coding and reviewing before this is ready to be implemented in Diaspora's code. Until Diaspora has a workable API, it's going to be difficult to have viable integration with Twitter and other services enabling user to see for example their Twitter feed within Diaspora. Of course, it may well be possible to create a separate JS widget (not integrated into Diaspora's codebase), to be downloaded by individual users and stored as a user script within their browsers. This could amend the Diaspora page such that it can display a Twitter feed on the same page as Diaspora's stream, without actually integrating this feed into Diaspora's stream, and could perhaps be based on Twitter's standard widget. I hope this is (a) correct and (b) useful. |
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@goobertron twitter API is enough to get content from Twitter imo, that's what mobile apps do for example. But terms of use are strict. |
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@Flaburgan the proposal is for greater integration than simply displaying content from Twitter. I said at the end that a user script could be created, based on Twitter's widget, to display a Twitter feed within Diaspora pages. |
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The advantage of allowing people to see their Facebook feed is this: it would go a long way in encouraging people to switch from, and eventually stop using, Facebook. One of the major difficulties of getting people to switch social networks is that they don't want to lose contact with their friends. Case in point: Google+. While their social network arguably left something to be desired to say the least, they figuratively had more money than God to create it and a vast pool of brilliant young-ish minds to dream it up. Yet still they had to coerce and sometimes, as in the case of YouTube, for example, literally force people to sign up for their service and they still do to this day. People hate change. And while they, myself included, will complain about Facebook to no end, my friends (lower case "F") tell me that they would be hard pressed to switch services simply because they are afraid that no one else will. While they are also afraid of learning something new their primary fear is simply of shouting into the ether and not hearing anything in return. Other than that, I think they have little to fear as far as change is concerned. Diaspora even has a "Like" link under peoples' posts. While I personally don't like the "Like" it IS there and should help belay some apprehension when considering the switch from Facebook.* If they just had their feeds from Facebook they would be happy. I don't think getting more people to switch would be hard at all if only that feature were available. At any rate, I came across this thread after signing up for Diaspora. I wanted to be able to fully and properly promote it to my friends and I was searching for the very thing being discussed here so that I can better lure them away from the land of the Facebook. -Cyber *Concerning "Like": I know why Facebook will never take away the "Like" link or even add a "Dislike" option, for that matter. I think that if they were to add an alternative to "Like" the problem would be this: people would use it. As it stands right now, you can post anything you wish and the only purely quantitative feedback you will ever get, aside from the number of comments, is the number of "Likes". I have a feeling that if they were to add a "Dislike" feature that many would be seriously put off by people simply "Disliking" their posts. I don't know why but there is something about human psychology wherein much significance is placed on things with numbers attached to them much like scoring. Right now you can only get a positive "score", if you get anything at all. I would be willing to wager that if a "Dislike" feature were added, Facebooks numbers would be affected in a way not to Mr. Zuckerberg's liking. Yes, it's always sunny in Facebook Land... I think a good alternative would be to have some sort of neutral indicator such as "Viewed". It could either be automatically registered if it appears on someone elses screen or manually selected by someone if they wished to mark that post. It could be something akin to YouTube with Views, Thumbs Up/Down. I really have no problem with Like/Dislike or Thumb Up/Down. I just have this weird feeling that we're never going to see it at the likes (pun?) of Facebook... |
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I'd like this too. Anyone working on the Facebook integration? |
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I doubt this is even workable and thus IMHO should be closed... From Facebook permission docs:
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/facebook-login/permissions/v2.2#reference-read_stream diaspora* is a web app - and thus, will not ever be granted this permission by Facebook. |
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CybershamanX is absolutely correct here, and I'm a bit concerned that the Diaspora devs don't seem to realize how important this kind of functionality is in getting people to switch. It is a DEAL-BREAKER that Facebook content be available to new users, at least as an option, regardless of what privacy issues this might raise. The number 1 priority for participating in social media is to be connected, and regardless of what fantastic ideals we might be pitching for joining a non-commercial decentralized one that doesn't spy on you or advertise.... it's plainly obvious that most people trade all of those things for the connectivity with just a little grumbling. They go where the people are. Even speaking as someone who really believes 1000% in Diaspora's purpose and would love to see Facebook burn to the ground, I am STILL reluctant to join because it severs so many of my connections. I can proselytize to my friends until I'm blue in the face, but they won't switch for the same reason I hesitated, only they DON'T have a tin-foil hat like mine to motivate them. For so many people, myself included, just keeping up on Facebook is enough work, I don't need another news feed to read in a separate platform where nobody I know lives. I'm reminded of the way Apple is slowly unseating the incumbant SMS protocol by providing a completely user-experience-transparent alternative (iMessage) that most people have no idea they're using. When iOS devices message each other, they use iMessage, when they message other mobile devices they revert to SMS. This switch is completely invisible to the user, and it would not have taken hold if it had been otherwise. Now they've amassed such a user base using iMessage that it is practical, even a selling point that Wifi-only devices and Macs can communicate via this protocol. But if they had approached people 5 years ago and said "Hey, wanna switch to iMessage? It's better in every way, but you can't communicate with anyone who uses SMS", they would have been roundly rejected, and rightfully so. That's the kind of connectivity we need. Regardless of how it might clutter up the Stream or compromise privacy (only for correspondence via the FB protocol yeah?), it is absolutely essential and you will not see Diaspora unseat Facebook without it. We could even be pushy in clever little ways, like a little reminder at the bottom of FB correspondence that warns of an insecure connection, or some other "bad network" "good network" highlighting. Privacy will come gradually instead of a complete detachment from one's less progress-minded peers. |
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@metafarion Did you read jaywink's comment? I think the Facebook permission docs are pretty clear about this topic. That means we are not able to display Facebook content because Facebook doesn't allow us to do that. For me this is a |
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Affirm. Building applications displaying Facebook stream contents where possible in the past, but that changed a year ago. |
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Yes, it's actually pretty clear, I close this, we're not allowed to do it. |
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In order to close this huge gap for the new users (I actually have no incentive to use Diaspora before I can integrate FB in it) I want to mention the possibility for a hack around - a browser extension. The browser extension would rip the posts from the actual FB web page and display them in the diaspora news feed. I don't think it would be against any policies, since it's all happening on the user side. The ripping part won't be an easy task, but such a set of browser extensions (maybe using a common JS library) would benefit many projects that want to use FB content, so I guess with enough people getting behind the idea it would be possible. A link to the extension can be offered along with the existing FB integration. |
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+1. I think this is an excellent idea and would love to work on such a feature. |
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Yeah, that seems like a decent solution in the face of an impassable TOS. I wonder if it would have to be visibly unaffiliated with the Diaspora project to escape FB's wrath. |
Any solution that would be code as a browser extension and not core diaspora* code would automatically be not involved with the diaspora project officially. So go ahead do what you like! :) |
It is not an issue it is just a feature.
I would just like to have everything in one place, So one facebook filter on left side which can display posts from Facebook.
Is it possible to read posts just like in Facebook home page through API? Maybe some notifications also?
I think this integration can bring more people in and would be easier for them to migrate from biggest network to Diaspora.
Is it too much? Anyway this feature looks like reinventing Facebook. :)
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