Show HN: A Chrome extension to remind you why you opened Facebook

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/focusbook/gpgidhknoflhjnncoihnmonkehncnpgl

by joshblour • 10 years ago

122 53 10 years ago

chrome.google.com

wutbrodo• 10 years ago

News feed eradicator is another useful tool along the same lines.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicat...

knn• 10 years ago

The news feed eradicator has been a very good solution for me. I can still message, participate in groups, but that damned newsfeed is blocked! The newsfeed is engineered to suck up all of our precious cognitive space and fill it with mostly junk.

kevan• 10 years ago

I found this out recently, in case anyone else doesn't know, messenger.com [1] gets you facebook chat without the rest of facebook. I use it a lot during the day when I want to talk to people but not get sucked into the news feed.

[1] https://www.messenger.com/

MasterScrat• 10 years ago

A similar idea that comes to mind seeing this:

Every hour, you should see a quick summary of the pages you browsed through for the past hour.

It's easy to waste time not realizing how long you spent on AskReddit/TvTropes/whatever...

But if an hour of browsing flashes before your eyes and you can see nothing productive, it will wake you up.

946789987649• 10 years ago

I really like that, I might get to work on it. Can't imagine it'd be too hard.

halflings• 10 years ago

This doesn't look super pretty, but seems to do the job:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/timestats/ejifodhj...

rlv-dan• 10 years ago

Many years ago I visited a large (junk) news site several times every day (aftonbladet.se - largest site in Sweden). I asked myself why, but couldn't tell. So I started writing down what articles I had read that had been worth ready. Not much it turned out. So I stopped visiting it, and don't regret it. But it was really hard to break the habit, like an addiction.

aryamaan• 10 years ago

I am similar boat these days. Every 10 minutes I am doing spending reading something on mobile, 8 minutes will be on Facebook.

Yesterday, I deleted the app and found myself multiple times missing that. So, yeah, it's a habit hard to break. And now, I try to spend same amount of time reading some light book on my kindle app.

ahel• 10 years ago

It's like a month that I uninstalled the facebook app, because it didn't provide enough value. I didn't noticed the correlation until now, but last week I started carrying with me my old kindle touch during my commute. It just happened and I'm at Chapter 11 of Crystal Society [http://crystal.raelifin.com/].

educar• 10 years ago

I like this idea except I don't use facebook. Sign me up when you target HN :-)

noobie• 10 years ago

HN already has an in-built anti-procrastination feature.

aidos• 10 years ago

I could have really used this the other night when I went on to wish my friend a happy birthday....and then missed her birthday.

joshblour6• 10 years ago

hhahhaha then this was made for you XD

unicornporn• 10 years ago

I found that the timeline is the problem. It has been tweaked and reworked to make you spend as much time as possible mindlessly scrolling, liking and interacting.

I solved the problem by simply removing the timeline. Well, you can't actually remove it. But unfollowing everyone and everything results in this:

https://i.imgur.com/w4JZbct.png

It might not be for everyone, but it works excellent for me. And nowadays I actually complete what I came there for.

reustle• 10 years ago

I found the same. The news feed was the only bad part about Facebook. Events, chat, groups, are all great. I killed my news feed using this handy extension

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kill-news-feed/hjo...

andy_ppp• 10 years ago

I too have done the same, unfortunately Facebook has added a feature that tells me I haven't seen posts against each person. It's better to be able to catch up on your own terms though and a surprising amount of things I've missed out on such as new progeny and marriage proposals are somewhat more relevant than videos of Sad Ben Afleck :-D

herbst• 10 years ago

I do the same. My Facebook account is basically my Business account and nothing else. No friends, no likes other than my sites, no nothing.

rollinDyno3• 10 years ago

I've done the same, it took me a few days to finish unfollowing everyone but it was completely worth it. I find Facebook an excellent tool for connecting with people but the feed is too time expensive, that's supposedly how we pay for the service but if there's a way to circumvent it, I'll take it!

aratno• 10 years ago

I was considering doing this too, but it would have taken way too long so I never got around to it.

Instead, I used Adblock and blocked the entire div! Now if I want to see my newsfeed, I can just log in on incognito, which I hardly ever do. Works great.

amelius• 10 years ago

I need a similar thing to remind me why I visited Google, after playing with the doodle.

bottled_poe• 10 years ago

How about a different solution to prevent the problem in the first place - A chrome extension to warn you before loading that tempting facebook link that you are about to spend (statistically) x minutes on Facebook.

welanes2• 10 years ago

On the problem of wasting time browsing - I stick to a rough Pomodoro style principle. Coffee in the morning while I spend 20 minutes gorging on the sweet sweet stream of fresh info from HN/Reddit/Feedly/Twitter that surfaced while I slept.

Anything that looks interesting but requires more than a few minutes to chew on (like this, today: FBI Paid More Than $1M to Hack San Bernardino iPhone) I bookmark.

Throughout the day I take 10mins break for each 50mins of work, I don't go to these sites again, I just work through what I picked out in that first 20 minutes.

Gets the thirst for news out of the way and allows you to procrastinate, in a sense, "productively".

rollinDyno3• 10 years ago

That 'sweet sweet stream' actually contains not what surfaced while you slept but during the whole day except your allotted 20 minutes.

How do you consume 4 streams (HN, Reddit, Feedly and Twitter) each containing roughly 24 hours of activity, in 20 minutes?

giancarlostoro• 10 years ago

I'm pretty sure he means he looks at all the headlines, and then picks whatever is the most relevant / interesting to read throughout the day.

gedrap2• 10 years ago

HN Algolia is neat for this kind of workflow https://hn.algolia.com/?query=&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page... just check it once a day, pick up what to read for the rest of the day.

welanes2• 10 years ago

Not too hard. As giancarlostoro said, I simply skim in the mornings - open my favorite sites, find posts I think are worth reading and middle click a lot. Go through the resulting new tabs and bookmark what seems interesting for later.

The goal isn't to read every single new thing on the Internet, but between my pre-filtered sites and the morning skim I get a nice slice of interesting content to read throughout the day.

basch• 10 years ago

Ive been finding this more satisfying and easier to do lately. http://redef.com/channel/media/feed

Keep it open, read an article when I have a free moment. Next free moment scroll to next interesting article. Dont get sucked too far elsewhere into the internet. Not always easy to do. Look where I am now.

Buetol• 10 years ago

Speaking of facebook-related chrome extensions, I recommand this work of art, suprinsigly well done to the finest details: Ponyhoof https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ponyhoof/efjjgphed...

rollinDyno3• 10 years ago

We are starting to realise that information overload is leading to a diabetes-like condition for the mind. Solutions like these mean we haven't only diagnosed ourselves but also almost immediately fighting back.

allemagne• 10 years ago

I generated a random password for Facebook, put it in my phone, and then promptly logged out of FB in chrome.

I can look at facebook on my phone all I want, but the app sucks anyway and I feel like an obvious slacker if I look at my phone for a long time, or glance at it more frequently than once an hour or so.

Works for me.

ambivalence• 10 years ago

One more trick for you: use messenger.com if you need contact with people at work but don't want notifications or the news feed to distract you.

gedrap2• 10 years ago

This. Since I've started using messenger.com, I check facebook.com about once a week. Was really easy to switch and saved a lot of mental energy and attention that would have went for random facebook posts, etc.

cpach• 10 years ago

That’s great! I had no idea messenger.com even existed...

rorygreen• 10 years ago

Having used Facebook mainly for the messaging functionality for years now, I'm amazed I never knew messenger.com existed. It's interesting to consider that, although I use an ad-blocker, it must be in Facebook's interests to keep people on the main site in order to throw adverts at them, further infiltrate their lives etc.

mullsork• 10 years ago

They're adding all sorts of junk to Messenger. Surely they're monetizing that platform on itself already, or will soon.

kevincox• 10 years ago

I love messenger.com

It's a way better interface for just chatting then the Facebook site and they have been adding new features to it regularly.

My only complaint is that it refuses to work on mobile (even though the desktop site is very responsive). It just pushes you at the app.

Aldo_MX• 10 years ago

I prefer to use Franz[1]

It's an electron-based app which allows you to load the web versions of Messenger, Whatsapp, Slack and many more.

[1] http://meetfranz.com/

tdkl• 10 years ago

If you want a desktop Messenger application, check this out : http://messengerfordesktop.com

Electron app, uses native notifications, no need to run a webpage in a browser.

druska• 10 years ago

This won't work because it requires user input. People are lazy, and unless you are extremely disciplined I guarantee you will stop wanting to use that input box very soon after installing.

Karawebnetwork• 10 years ago

EDIT: This piece of code wasn't used and has since been removed. This app has my stamp of approval now!

From the github:

"f.action = 'http://gtmetrix.com/analyze.html?bm';"

... are you tracking people with this application?

joshblour6• 10 years ago

hey Raphemdia, actual developer and OP here, (user yonah91 was created a few minutes ago) the line of code you're referring to is in a file called popup.js which is never actually loaded . It's from the sample code which I used to learn how to make a chrome extension (https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/getstarted#resources) I'll remove it now, so that people don't the wrong idea.

joshblour6• 10 years ago

done. File removed: https://github.com/yonahforst/focusbook/commit/491cf59a087c8...

Raphmedia• 10 years ago

Fair enough!

I didn't investigate much. Looking back, yes, this file was not used!

Definitely using your app and recommending it to my friends!

RIMR• 10 years ago

This would be a great plugin for the workplace, but it appears to be laced with profanity. That's definitely going to prevent a number of people from using it. Maybe redo the language and add an "Angry Mode" that is a bit more insulting if the user wants that...

Also, it's clearly tracking me, but nowhere can I find anything that discloses that. I can only assume you're collecting/selling my data, so there's absolutely no way I am installing this, and I am DEFINITELY not recommending it for workplace use, because I don't know what kind of data you might be collecting.

If you want to make some cash on these things, add some ads. You definitely have space in that injected header to fit a banner or two.

joshblour6• 10 years ago

Hey. Good point about the profanity. I'll add an option toggle it on and off. It was meant to be sort of a fun tool for myself.

About tracking, it is absolutely not tracking anything or anyone. That line of code referring to gtmetrix.com is from the sample google extension which i just forgot to remove. https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/getstarted#resources I'll remove it now. Sorry for the confusion. I hate tracking and would never do it to anyone without their permission (or even with their permission)

joshblour6• 10 years ago

done. file removed: https://github.com/yonahforst/focusbook/commit/491cf59a087c8...

joshblour6• 10 years ago

RIMR - I've just uploaded a new version to the chrome store that has a switch to turn off profanity. Keep an eye on the chrome store for version 1.3, it should be available in an hr or so

tammer• 10 years ago

Has somebody broken out FB events into a standalone app yet? Can't wait until the real world can go back to being the focus.

cableshaft• 10 years ago

I need this on my phone more than I need a chrome extension, since I mainly go to Facebook on my phone. But good idea!

lolptdr• 10 years ago

love the clear use of profanity and simplicity of this extension, but luckily facebook is blocked for me =)

ahmetsulek• 10 years ago

You should also see http://usedetox.com

You can access the feeds on Panda http://usepanda.com instead of Facebook feed.

vittore• 10 years ago

this should work for youtube, google, twitter and whole bunch of other things as well, not just facebook

Show HN: A Chrome extension to remind you why you opened Facebook

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