I strongly believe in Facebook as a platform for friends to keep in touch with each other. However, recently, I feel like Facebook has become more and more of a cess pool for people to post their opinions. You know what I'm talking about -- those 200-word manifestos about gay marriage or Donald Trump or police brutality. Although these are important issues, I do not think that these opinions belong on Facebook; I really think they actually belong on personal blogs that people will read only if they want to read.
So, here's GateKeeper, a Google Chrome extension built to customize your Facebook feed. Here are some of the features:
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Block posts related to current Twitter trends in the USA. People tend to post on Facebook about things that are trending, so let's just get rid of that. Twitter has a really restricted API limit, so I'm using CircleCI to call the Twitter API every ~7 minutes and throw the trends as a JSON file onto RackSpace. The extension makes a simple GET request to RackSpace to grab the trends.
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Block posts by keyword. In case Twitter doesn't catch some of the things you don't want to see, you can block them yourself. I snipe the posts on the feed (and the ticker sidebar) and run them through a NLP API.
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Block by mood. Filter out sadder posts. I run the posts through a sentiment analysis API.
If you have any suggestions or want to contribute to this project, please feel free to add an issue or submit a pull request!
NOTE:
This is not the Chrome extension itself. There are many things in this repository (like the node modules, circle.yml, etc.,) that are not required by the actual extension (technically) but are used behind the hood. If you fork and run this in Chrome on developer mode, everything should work the same. The main JS files used are js/filter.js, popup.js, and js/background.js. Any changes to filter.js should be followed by:
browserify js/filter.js -o js/bundle.js
You can now download the actual extension at www.bit.ly/fbgatekeeper
I'm also on Product Hunt! http://www.producthunt.com/tech/gatekeeper
Thanks!
TODO: Filter out posts in other languages