Chrome Extension: Facebook Filter

Update 17 June 2016: I've changed the focus of the extension to simply change the aspect of stories based on status, so that stories with content are highlighted over simple shares. I am currently working on another extension that is more adaptive, but it will be branded differently.

Update 27 May 2016: I've published the very early draft of the extension because it already does a cool thing: putting original content in the foreground and shrinking the reposts and photo uploads and feeling sharing and all that. You may find and install the extension here.

Have you ever wanted to decrease the spam in your Facebook page but couldn't do it in any way that would not make you miss important posts? I mean, even if you categorize all your contacts into good friends, close friends, relatives, acquaintances, then you unfollow the ones that really spam too much and you hide all posts that you don't like, you have no control over how Facebook decides to order what you see on the page. Worse than that, try to refresh repeatedly your Facebook page and see wildly oscillating results: posts appear, disappear, reorder themselves. It's a mess.

Well, true to this and my word I have started work on a Chrome extension to help me with this. My plan is pretty complicated, so before I publish the extension on the Chrome Webstore, like I did with my previous two efforts, I will publish this on GitHub while I am still working on it. So, depending on where I am, this might be alpha, beta or stable. At the moment of this writing - first commit - alpha is a pretty big word.

Here is the plan for the extension:

1. Detect the user has opened the Facebook page
2. Inject jQuery and extension code into the page
3. Detect any post as it appears on the page
4. Extract as many features as possible
5. Allow the user to create categories for posts
6. Allow the user to drag posts into categories or out of them
7. Use AI to determine the category a post most likely belongs to
8. Alternatively, let the user create their own filters, a la Outlook
9. Show a list of categories (as tabs, perhaps) and hide all posts under the respective categories

This way, one might skip the annoying posts, based on personal preferences, while still enjoying the interesting ones. At the time of this writing, the first draft, the extension only works on https://www.facebook.com, not on any subpages, it extracts the type of the post and sets a CSS class on it. It also injects a CSS which makes posts get dimmer and smaller based on category. Mouse over to get the normal size and opacity.

How to make it work for you:

1. In Chrome, go to Manage Extensions (chrome://extensions/)
2. Click on the Developer Mode checkbox
3. Click on the Load unpacked extension... button
4. Select a folder where you have downloaded the source of this extension
5. Open a new tab and load Facebook there
6. You should see the posts getting smaller and dimmer based on category.

Change statusProcessor.css to select your own preferences (you may hide posts altogether or change the background color, etc).

As usual, please let me know what you think and contribute with code and ideas.