Unfortunately, a lot of big news sites go with the force method, including Yahoo.
You do not get to show the app permission request as a dialog but that te only way you can put a gate before your contet and still allow ppl that select cancel to go through.
If you're implementing this sort of thing, do it the way ProPublica does: http://www.propublica.org/article/introducing-a-new-non-evil...
Only possibilities are, when the user clicks the link, to either bring them straight to the article, or ask them to install the app and if they hit "Yes," bring them to the article. Not possible to show the install app dialog box but not force an install in order to be redirected to the article. I wish it was though!
In terms of setting it to "only me" for sharing, yes that definitely works. But you're still giving the app read access to some of your Facebook info, and many users won't even think to change the setting to "only me" unfortunately.
Firefox user here, considering to switch for some time.
That said, I did find it extremely easy to create a Chrome extension. Really nice to have access to the DOM straight through javascript. Check out the source code for this extension...only took a few lines to write the actual logic
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?
Not really, Facebook already has the data, this is the app trying to get more data from you.
How long will it be before people assert rights over their own graph? When apps like this slurp down your entire Facebook life without compensating beyond an article read, there's a kind of sharecropping going on.
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).
I managed to find the "Unsocial Reader" while searching for previous efforts. I did not find "Frictionless", maybe because I didn't search for "frictionless sharing blocker," because that's not a term I thought to use.
In the case of Unsocial Reader, I saw it was doing Google "I'm feeling lucky" searches based on the title and figured the way I was doing it was more streamlined for the user because it was actually based on the article URL, and since my extension searches for a URL specific to Facebook (uiconnect.php) no changes to the DOM by app developers would bypass the fact that it still has to go through that Facebook URL.
In terms of cases it covers, it has worked every time I needed it to while I was on Facebook, but yes that was the extent of the testing I did. I think it is unfair to claim that all other projects besides your own work in only 5% of cases, considering the Unsocial Reader has almost 3x the users of Frictionless and a better star rating in the Chrome Web Store. Also, since a few sites represent the vast majority of the open graph links on Facebook (ex Yahoo), blocking their installers is most important to most users.
This was a weekend project of the mentality "I can get 80% of the results with 20% of the effort." It's something I threw together, just to solve my own problems (with Facebook and with being unable to find a plugin that fixed the problem). But now that Frictionless has been brought to my attention, I will certainly look over the source and see if there's a way I can contribute. Thanks.
