Show HN: Portrit.com - My Visual Facebook Experience - Use Key HN | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Portrit.com - My Visual Facebook Experience - Use Key HN

portrit.com

20 pointsjoneath22 comments

It's been four months of hacking and now I am ready to show the world Portrit. Portrit brings you your Facebook friends in visual experience. Portrit is all about your friends photos and making the Facebook experience cleaner, quicker, and more fun. Create a account at http://portrit.com/create_account/ Use the key HN. Limited supply!

I started working on Portrit because Facebook's photo service is junk and I wanted something better. Originally this was a personal side project but it has grown into my first startup! This is just a limited preview launch with official public beta coming soon.

If you don't have a Facebook account or just don't trust me with you data :), check out this blog post showing all the functionality of Portrit. http://blog.portrit.com/what-is-portrit

*edit - I just upgrade everyone who made an account to Social. This key was supposed to give everyone this upgrade when you made an account...My Bad. The Social account lets you comment and like post as well as select favorite friends or hide friends.

Wow this is pretty awesome. The photo perusing is quite fun with this UI.

In your Privacy Policy, you state that "We[you] only collect user analytics data. " For being more open with data, could you create some page within your application to report what bits of data you are storing about me?

I am using Google analytics to measure trafic as well as events. On the backend I store the email address the user used to create their account, their Facebook ID, favorite friend ID's, and hidden friend ID's. I wanted to be as private with data as possible. 95% of the code runs client side and never talks to the server.

I plan on updating both the privacy policy and the terms of service. I modeled them off of Digg's but I am no lawyer, I am a hacker :).

Your email validation code is too strict.

From Wikipedia:

  The local-part of the e-mail address may use any of these ASCII characters:
  Uppercase and lowercase English letters (a–z, A–Z)
  Digits 0 to 9
  Characters ! # $ % & ' * + - / = ? ^ _ ` { | } ~
  Character . (dot, period, full stop) provided that it is
  not the first or last character, and provided also that 
  it does not appear two or more times consecutively 
  (e.g. John..Doe@example.com).

Thanks, I will update the regex in the next release.

You should use the HTML5 email field:

http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/...

Very well designed, would be especially delightful on an iPad type device.

Using Chrome on a Mac though, nothing happens when I click on images from my feed. I'd expect that to at least preview a larger version, or maybe take me to the post itself.

There is actually optimized versions for iPad and mobile (iPhone and Android).

The photos in the feed do not open larger at this point. Still trying to work the black magic that is the Facebook API. The cursor pointer is some dev code that made it through to production be accident, whoops!

If I try searching for a friend by using their last name (easier in this case), it starts to match the name in the autocomplete but drops out once I've typed the full name for some reason...

also probably not a typical use case for names, but I do have FB friends that go by their middle names although their facebook profile has their full name.. can't search for them using middle name in autocomplete search

I forgot to say, awesome work and I like the visual look and feel and it does feel snappier than the real FB but still don't see why I should use it... maybe I don't "get" it?

Thanks for the feedback. At the moment there are not many differentiating features compared to Facebook, but I have a bunch planned. There are a lot cool things you can do when you are a intermediary between the user and all their Facebook data.

My guess is the target demographic is younger women or just women in general. Not to sound sexist but in my experience women browse Facebook photos in a much higher degree than males.

Is there any purpose in having a sign-up? If you're already linked to the user's Facebook account, isn't this enough?

Is it not a one-to-one relationship between Portrit and FB account?

The UI for 'likes' is confusing. The icon seemed very foreign, and the whole idea of putting profile pictures of people who have liked the post on the right isn't intuitive either.

The login is it limit the amount of users. This is what the key is for. When we officially launch this will be removed.

I agree that the like icon could use some work. The idea behind showing profile pictures of likes instead of names is one of the main ideas of Portrit. We are trying to limit the amount of text and promote discovery that may not have happened if the name was shown. We will look into making this action more intuitive.

Thanks for the feedback.

Great interface. Please add anchor titles to primary navigation buttons so I can figure out what they do by hovering before I click on them.

Looks great!!! but what would be the business model?

Yep, nice nice UI !! Bravo. So, about this business model ? :)

Possible bug. I see two profile picture for each friend for every alphabet. Am using Chrome 7.0.536.2.

I checked and this is the dev version of chrome right? The dev version has JavaScript errors in the Jquery library. I am looking into why this is. Thanks.

Mine is stuck with a loading image. Server too busy or does it take a while to initialize?

Too bad I do not have a FB account, but the screenshots look awesome. The stream page is kinda taking away from it, imo. I would focus 100% on photos.

This was definitely a conflict I had. I wanted to focus completely on photos but most test users wanted to be able to see their stream and comment/like. This is the most volatile feature in Portrit and will most likely change in the future.

I agree with this. It seems to me that Facebook puts most focus on the feed and that's hard to compete with. Flipboard has a nice take on this - unfortunately, locked in an app instead of on the web.

You have done a great job with the rest, navigation, and image browsing. There were a few glitches, the user info box and posts in the feed with images in them could use some finish.

All in all, great job and I think I understand where you're going with this!

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