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Show HN: Breakup Notifier
- sudonim 16y agoKudos for releasing the app! IMHO, Unless you're married, don't put your relationship status on FB. Set it as hidden, or say nothing. When things change, and in life they do... the people from whom you don't want to hear are the first to notice and / or comment on it.
- nostrademons 16y agoI even joined the group "I have never had sex with a goat" just so I could leave it at the same time I set my relationship status from "single" to undisclosed. Unfortunately, they got rid of that feature where it would broadcast to all of your friends that you've left a group...
- kinetik 16y agoUndisclosed? "It's complicated" seems more appropriate in that case.
- bigiain 16y agoIsn't "it's complicated" just Facebook jargon for "unhappily polyamorous"?
- nostrademons 16y agoI've also seen it used to mean "I'm still sleeping with this person but don't want anyone to think he's my boyfriend." Fucknemeses would also seem to be an appropriate use-case.
- prodigal_erik 16y ago"Acquaintances who occasionally happen to bump into each other. Naked. With our crotches." http://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=1221 http://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=1221
- brc 16y agoDepending on your SO - you might not get that chance. It's not a problem I'm likely to get but I can just imagine the question 'why haven't you updated me as your girlfriend on facebook?'
- potatolicious 16y agoIt beats the alternative: why are you still marked as "single" on Facebook? If you just leave it off, you can at least make a case out of principle for it.
- tjpick 16y agoIs marriage more stable than other forms of relationship?
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- eftpotrm 16y agoStatistically, yes. Not, I suspect, because marriage suddenly confers stability and harmony onto relationships where none was previously, but because of a mix of people having to pay a large deposit on the relationship and of non-marriage relationships getting lumped in with pre-hypothetical-marriage relationships.
- meursault 16y agogreat idea. this is actually how my wife and i met. no joke. i had just ended a long relationship and changed my status on facebook. she noticed and started messaging me.
- cynest 16y agoPeople have started relationships on/through Facebook that have turned into marriages. A bit of a blow to the part of me that thinks of Facebook as new.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- jarin 16y agoThis is the most pointless, trivial, absurd, creepy app I've seen in a while. Signed up. I think it will be massively successful!
- spxdcz 16y agoReminds me of the creepy Twitter bot I set up a couple of years ago (which is still going): http://twitter.com/reboundfinder http://twitter.com/reboundfinder The account got a mention on MSNBC; I have no idea why.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- paulschreiber 16y agoDavid Weekly did this for MySpace a while back. It was called SingeStat.us: http://techcrunch.com/2006/06/05/find-out-when-your-friends-become-single/ http://techcrunch.com/2006/06/05/find-out-when-your-friends-...
- dweekly 16y agoGood times that was - Fox Interactive sent me a Cease and Desist a week after I launched. :)
- kmfrk 16y agoThe fact that this domain wasn't taken restores some semblance of my faith in humanity.
- Splines 16y agoBut now it is. Is your faith zero-sum?
- jmm 16y agoThis is hilarious. And fits nicely with the expression, "girls are like parking spots; the good ones are always taken."
- po 16y agoThis app is the equivalent of "circling" the lot instead of parking far away. Would make for good logo inspiration. :-)
- Mz 16y agoThat's called "vulching" among folks I know. (If you aren't familiar with it, the word refers to "circling like a vulture" -- at least in this case. A quick search turns up different uses of the word which are similar but not identical.)
- zitterbewegung 16y agoOne of the problems with this from a social perspective is that people lie about their relationship status on facebook.
- jhamburger 16y agoI don't think people lie about being in relationships (unless it's a joke same sex heterosexual thing), and they definitely don't lie about breaking up. Sure some people won't have a status at all but nothing you can do about that.
- oceanician 16y agoI've been in several relationships with 'Al Co Hol'
- dotBen 16y agoYou could take the code base you have written and probably adjust just a few lines of code to turn it into an app that tells you when a friend dumps you on Facebook. This is actually what I thought you had built, and for me would be even more useful + interesting. (Or, open source the code and let someone else do it)
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- chr15 16y agoI built a Facebook app that does this for personal use. It's broken now since they released API changes, but it's pretty easy to do. Maybe I should go back and fix it and open source it. Not sure what Facebook's policies say about these sort of notifications though.
- sayemm 16y agoYup, that's what I was thinking too. I'm nearly done working on something just for that, will post to HN soon
- nickpatrick 16y agoJust launched my app for this. http://www.defriendalert.com http://www.defriendalert.com
- adrianwaj 16y agoGood way to jump the queue. Would work well with facial recognition on beauty. Another idea: an unfriend notifier. (like with a twitter unfollow notifier)
- synacksynack 16y agoHere's a Greasemonkey script for unfriend notifications. http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/58852 http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/58852
- rudiger 16y agoA while back, I heard that Facebook can predict when two people in a relationship are about to break up, based on statistical patterns in account activity prior to break-ups. I'm not familiar with the Facebook APIs or what sort of account activity is statistically significant, but that would be a cool app that's very similar to this. Log in with Facebook, and show which of your in-a-relationship friends has the highest probability of breaking up. Obviously harder than a notification after the break-up, but prediction would be cool and useful.
- redthrowaway 16y agoThat does sound damned cool, but would facebook give you access to that information?
- rudiger 16y agoFacebook isn't going to provide "probabilityOfBreakUp" in their API, but you might be able to build a factor model from accessible information; for instance, number of photos in which a couple are both tagged might be a statistically significant factor.
- mikeknoop 16y agoI think the most significant criteria is how many times one looks at their profile. Facebook has always been very adamant about technically disallowing this for apps.
- wilzy 16y ago...no doubt there will be multiple factors used to conclude this kind of information.
- wisty 16y agoNo, the most significant criteria will be how many times one looks at somebody else's profile. IMs and messages would also be quite significant. But that's even less likely to get released.
- fookyong 16y agoFree Version Notification Email: X is now single. Paid Version Notification Email (with semantic analysis!): X is now single. She broke up with her boyfriend because he didn't pay enough attention to her. Lately she has been listening to Arcade Fire and eating cupcakes. Click to phone X now - suggest getting a cupcake together.
- prawn 16y ago'Click here to update your status to talk about how much you like the new Arcade Fire album.'
- Cafesolo 16y ago"Buy the latest Arcade Fire album now." (Amazon affiliate link)
- sudonim 16y agoIf you haven't seen it... http://whoisarcadefire.tumblr.com/ http://whoisarcadefire.tumblr.com/ An amusing reaction to their winnings at the grammys
- TimothyBurgess 16y agoOkay seriously though I've never heard of arcade fire... they won a grammy? I'm confused. And thanks for that site because now I know I'm not alone. I just pulled up their suburbs song on youtube and now I'm even more at a loss. It's a mad world out there, man. I'm a big metalhead though. That's my excuse. It'd be cool if metal could win album of the year! ...for technical prowess. It's pretty hard to beat metal in that respect - but it does depend on the subgenre of metal. Jazz is the only other genre that comes close.
- taway004 16y agothere is absolutely no reason for these comments to be downvoted as much as they are buncha arcade fire defending hipsters here im guessing and dont give me any of that bullshit about comments with no substance because these comments have more substance than many others ive seen that get upvoted
- zaidf 16y agoI'm thinking the app would have to store the present status on its server in order to know of a status change. But isn't storing profile data server-side a violation of FB TOS?
- jarin 16y agoYou can store data for up to 24 hours, so all you have to do is look for a change on two consecutive days. Edit: That was the old policy, the new one lets you store it forever as long as you try to keep it up to date.
- zaidf 16y agoSo essentially it is ok to store data infinitely as long as you are updating it every 24hrs?
- jarin 16y agoEr wait, that was an old policy. Here's the new one: "You may cache data you receive through use of the Facebook API in order to improve your application’s user experience, but you should try to keep the data up to date. This permission does not give you any rights to such data."
- cycojesus 16y ago"should try" sounds pretty vague and unenforceable.
- vchien 16y agoBrilliant - FB: college students nationwide began to capitalize on the ability to catalogue pictures of themselves doing keg stands, and to find out the relationship status of people they are interested in...
- mikeknoop 16y agoIt looks the the auth breaks if your profile doesn't have certain expected fields accessible (gender?).
- younata 16y agoyou might want to turn off the django debug stuff.
- jschuur 16y agoThis app is useless until Felicia Day, Scarlett Johansson or Jenna Fischer accept my friend requests.
- JacobAldridge 16y agoOr the flowers you've been sending to their publicists. Or the dead pigeons you've been leaving out of love (and to send a warning message to others) on their front porches.
- Cafesolo 16y agoThe first thing that comes to my mind when I see an opportunity to integrate a Facebook login button with a website is how to attract traffic from Facebook. One of the most effective ways is publishing updates to the user's wall. However in this case it's tricky. You don't want everyone to know that you'll be notified when Pamela is single.
- AndyKelley 16y agoIt's cool to support gay people and all, but if I'm straight I shouldn't have to look at all the dudes when I'm clicking who I'm interested in.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- bwaldorf 16y agoWorst HN comment ever.
- AndyKelley 16y agoHuh? There's several hundred people on that list for me. It took 5 minutes to scroll through and decide which ones to click. It could have taken 2.5 minutes. Clearly this is desirable? If not, please explain.
- sliverstorm 16y agoYou managed to turn a simple feature request into subtle anti-gay propaganda, whether you meant it or not.
- AndyKelley 16y agoI see. I think people are being too sensitive.
- nailer 16y agoYour comment isn't offensive to me, but I it looks like it is because of the disclaimer, which you don't need. If you turned: "It's cool to support gay people and all, but if I'm straight I shouldn't have to look at all the dudes when I'm clicking who I'm interested in." into: "If I'm straight I shouldn't have to look at all the dudes when I'm clicking who I'm interested in." I don't think people would misunderstand it.
- ilteris 16y agoI was thinking of building a similar app. it auto posts to your friends wall on their birthdays. New level in automated relationships.
- wladimir 16y agoYes, wouldn't it be great if mundane stuff such as maintaining relationships was automated, so that we could focus on the fun and interesting things in life.
- jaredsohn 16y agoI thought of that, too, a few months ago. But several people had beaten me (and you) to it. (http://www.google.com/#hl=en&sugexp=egsisas&xhr=t&q=facebook+birthday+automatic http://www.google.com/#hl=en&sugexp=egsisas&xhr=t...).
- theli0nheart 16y agoA few days ago, my fiancee and her mom were talking about setting up a nice guy with my fiancee's sister. Unfortunately, said guy is in a relationship. My mother-in-law to be suggested it would be nice to know when the relationship was over (jokingly). I blurted out that I could make something that could do that in a couple of hours. By then, I knew I had to do it. The application was built on Google Appengine, Django, and the Facebook Graph API. I'm checking for status changes every 24 hours, and am using the Appengine mail service to send emails whenever I notice that a relationship status has changed. Seriously, this is mostly a joke. But enjoy, if you do choose to use it for real.
- phirephly 16y agoOnly every 24 hours?!? But when the window is open, you RUN! Did Ted Mosby teach us nothing?
- zalew 16y ago+1 for HIMYM reference, I thought the same :) 24hrs is not 'be the first to know', probably all her/his friends will know that before. When I changed status I had a dozen comments in SECONDS.
- dacort 16y agoWould you be able to use real-time updates for this to avoid polling? http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/user/ http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/user/ I'm not sure if it notifies you on friends changes or just the user that authed your app. I assume the latter.
- oceanician 16y agoBy the time the status changes it's probably too late for a significant number of cases, whereby 2 weeks later the status is 'in relationship' again. However, there's probably some worthwhile activity in monitoring wall posts from ex's in the period running up to the status change? Humans are completely unpredictable mind... haha :)
- kersny 16y agoI literally laughed out loud when I saw this... great project. I'd start checking the Twilio blog (http://blog.twilio.com/ http://blog.twilio.com/) for contests and implement their API to do SMS and Call notifications, you might win something.
- theli0nheart 16y agoHahah, thanks :) With SMS & Call notifications, this could get really out of control. Just imagine...a hot girl you like ends her relationship, and with the Twilio API, Breakup Notifier automatically sets up a "rebound call". Beginning to fear for my morals.
- ohashi 16y agoI give you moral approval. Nobody has to know!
- JanezStupar 16y agoAnd imagine how cool you will be when you bomb her with phone calls along with 120 other men (80 of which are in a relationship) - at the same time. Not saying it wouldn't be successful tho.
- kenmck 16y agoDidn't Facebook kill something like this a few years ago?
- danvoell 16y agoI think they have banned quite a few companies trying to do this. You can still do it on Myspace though ;)
- theli0nheart 16y agoI would be honored to write an app banned by Facebook. One less thing on the bucket list.
- OoTheNigerian 16y agoOne little suggestion: If two people select themselves, why wait until they breakup?
- CWIZO 16y agoAwesome idea! Do this please: look at my "Interested in" info and only show me people of that gender.
- fezzl 16y agoIf I secretly admire a person, I would've been stalking her profile very regularly already. This app is not too useful to me personally.
- freddealmeida 16y agoA fun app but really is this the "kind" of choice we want to make? I'm worried about these forward-focused apps mean to privacy in the long term.
- TeMPOraL 16y agoAt the moment of writing this comment, this app has 88 likes and 446 tweets. I wonder if people don't click "Like" in order not to reveal that they're interested in using the application ;).
- slig 16y agoWho else remembers the singlestat.us? IIRC, facebook killed the service.
- thomasdavis 16y agoTHIS IS GREAT, I SELECTED ABOUT 30 PEOPLE CAN'T WAIT FOR MY EMAILS. WHERE IS YOUR TWITTER ACCOUNT SO I CAN FOLLOW YOU FOR UPDATES. I AM SO EXCITED
- sokoloff 16y agoI think it's @CapsLock
- jshort 16y agoI read the title completely wrong. I recently had an idea for facebook that breakup notifications. So for instance when its your birthday or someone decides to upload a photo album and tag you in 10 pictures it is sort of annoying to receive email/phone notifications one after an other, this app would simply allow you to set up the ability to put a delay on when you receive them and it pools them together. So if you get one notification it would wait x minutes and then it pools all the notifications you get until no more notifications arrive within x minutes. Then you just get one pretty notification with all the annoying notifications you would have received one after another.
- msluyter 16y agoNext up, an app to see who's monitoring you on Breakup Notifier... "Three people are waiting for you to break up! Click here to find out more!"
- jmslsr 16y agoThis just came across the news ticker on CNN. Congrats?
- FaceKicker 16y agoSecond most popular article in CNN's "Tech" category, at the time of posting. http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/social.media/02/21/facebook.relationship.status/index.html?hpt=Sbin http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/social.media/02/21/facebook.rel... Wow, what a quick way to get your name out there... Congrats OP.
- bkhl 16y agoAs a lot of people said already, this is very creepy. Yet, there will be tons of users who would use this... By the way, can you get notifications on multiple people? (now, that's really creepy)
- ses 16y agoIf I'm honest (and I'm hoping you're welcoming of honest feedback be it positive or negative), I think this is a ludicrous idea. The problem with something this polarising is, I fail to see how it could grow into a product everyone might use, even if it is used begrudgingly. Unless there's something spectacularly clever that I've missed you're not going to ever win over people that are in the camp that I'm in and hate the very idea of it. I didn't like facebook when it came along, but I didn't hate it either. Hence why I eventually signed up for an account. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that you are actually quite a decent developer, and that if this is indeed the case, please divert your efforts to something more beneficial to yourself and/or society. There are so many talented developers working on 'quirky' web and mobile apps who could provide solutions to problems that enhance people's lives and also stimulate the economy. I'm not saying your efforts aren't impressive in themselves (if you're going by the andy warhol rubric of measuring your feedback in inches you've been quite successful already), just that they show that there's so much more you could do.
- audyyy 16y agoYou could monetize this by charging to see if your SO has used the site
- heffay 16y agoJust wanted to add a note and say that my local rock radio station (in Phoenix) mentioned breakupnotifier.com today on the morning show. =)
- realitygrill 16y agoI am absolutely amazed to have read this yesterday, then heard about it again this morning on a local radio station (I'm from the Midwest). Wow. How's it holding up?
- jfriedly 16y agoWell, if Facebook unblocks you, you might want to look into adding another feature: relationship creation notifications for specific users. Target user: People like me that don't check Facebook everyday, but would still like to receive an email when their friend finally makes it Facebook-official that him and the girl he's been talking to for weeks are dating.