Ha I remember the same thing used to be possible with MSN if you used a third party client.
You could have it open a window when someone started typing to you, before they sent their message.
A Facebook Sixth Sense
41–50 of 84 posts
Re: A Facebook Sixth Sense
#42So, as a code example, fine---but I'd caution against actually using this with your friends unless you know they're okay with it. They will be acting under certain social expectations with regard to when and how people can see their typing notifications based on when and how they were able to see them before, and if you tweak your way into getting more access without your conversation partners knowing it beforehand,…
Psychic mode is/was amazing. I used to love freaking people out when I saw the 'You feel a disturbance in the force...' message and quickly type 'Hi!'.
Re: A Facebook Sixth Sense
#43Contrary to popular belief, Ajax is actually one of the best things to have happened for hooking up to Web Apps and scraping. You used to have to walk through the obscure rendered html, now you mostly get to access the raw data in json format.
is this really a contrarian opinion? i feel like this is a pretty obvious fact that it's easier to read network requests to scrape a website than parsing html
Re: A Facebook Sixth Sense
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good for us that there is no such thing as closed source client side logic in web applications (without installing extensions/plugins). You can only obfuscate.
Well, if they introduced some "special feature" that's available only when you install a certain plugin, I am sure millions of people will do it just because they can get the "special feature."
Browsers won't support plugins for long (extensions yes, but those are as open as websites).
Still, even a binary can be reverse engineered; you see it all the time.
Re: A Facebook Sixth Sense
#45Re: A Facebook Sixth Sense
#46A little while ago, someone used Facebook's last active time to track their friends' sleep: https://medium.com/life-tips/how-you-can-use-facebook-to-tra...
I remember a bunch of friends being upset about this. Apparently it's an outrage that your friends can do this, and perfectly fine that facebook probably does it all the time.
Re: A Facebook Sixth Sense
#47I think I recall this being implemented back in the AIM days. A "psychic" plugin for Pidgin or something like that.
Re: A Facebook Sixth Sense
#48Contrary to popular belief, Ajax is actually one of the best things to have happened for hooking up to Web Apps and scraping. You used to have to walk through the obscure rendered html, now you mostly get to access the raw data in json format.
is this really a contrarian opinion? i feel like this is a pretty obvious fact that it's easier to read network requests to scrape a website than parsing html
Is there a specific tool you would recommend for doing this?
Re: A Facebook Sixth Sense
#49Contrary to popular belief, Ajax is actually one of the best things to have happened for hooking up to Web Apps and scraping. You used to have to walk through the obscure rendered html, now you mostly get to access the raw data in json format.
is this really a contrarian opinion? i feel like this is a pretty obvious fact that it's easier to read network requests to scrape a website than parsing html
I'm not sure why, but many scraping tools handle javascript websites by emulating clicks and running the javascript.
Re: A Facebook Sixth Sense
#50Fun article! I appreciate the author taking the time to go through the details, like formatting the source of the javascript, and figuring out the module system. Hacking on other peoples' websites is great fun. Everyone should try it, and I hope this article encourages a few people to!
I hack on Slack, which is complex enough that even small UI changes require hideous hacks. And since the javascript and CSS changes out from under you constantly, nothing ever works for long. I'm reverse engineering something to create an opportunity to produce code that runs against an API that will change without notice. But I get big, visible improvements I see every day, and the feeling of changing something that wasn't meant to be changed is just so unreasonably satisfying!