Show HN: Lookmark, read what your friends are reading (for Chrome)

[dzohrob]

Hi HN, we'd love to get your feedback on the product we've been working on. Read a bit more about why we built it here: http://blog.lookmark.com/post/31927814893/why-we-built-lookm...

Happy to answer questions/get feedback here or via email -- [email protected]. Thanks for checking it out.

[jamesbritt]

"We use Facebook only for identification. No sharing without your permission (promise!)"

While Lookmark may intend to follow all honorable practices, I'm curious if there are things Facebook can decide to do to subvert this.

IOW, does Facebook track the use of an account for Lookmark identification? Are they tracking when a user signs in to Lookmark?

Just how much does Facebook get to know about a user's use of Lookmark?

Thanks, BTW, for offering a non-FB way to sign up.

[dzohrob]

Thanks for checking it out.

We don't ask for permission to post to your Facebook feed, so FB can't change anything there. Facebook definitely tracks the last time you used an app -- they expose it to you via the Application Settings tab (http://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=applications). I don't know what else they're tracking behind the scenes though. That's why we offer a non-Facebook login option.

[zooteo]

Looks awesome. I hope you succeed but the average person is going to be weary of accidentally auto-sharing that "article" they were reading on redtube.com

[amitm]

Thanks! Automatic sharing is opt-in instead of opt-out, which means you would have to manually add a site like redtube. On top of that, we've prevented our software from ever touching certain sites, including search engines, webmail accounts, banking or financial institution pages, and adult websites.

Check out our faq: http://lookmark.com/faq

[rrival]

Looks cool - logo immediately reminds me of Valvoline's - http://www.valvoline.com/

[rohamg]

Well done Dave & team, looks and works awesome

[dzohrob]

Thanks!

[tobylane]

How well does this take in information from other similar things in Facebook? The Guardian is the paper I see most in my feed, does Lookmark take note of those?

[dzohrob]

We're not scraping much data from other sites yet -- we wanted to focus on the core experience of "read what your friends are reading." We plan on taking advantage of more data sources in the future, though I don't think any Facebook Social Reader apps have open APIs.

[nuttendorfer]

I'm surprised they let you delete your account, a rarity these days. Turned out none of my friends are interested in this so I deleted it.

[autophil]

Compliments on the domain name Lookmark. Clever. Did you have to buy if from someone, or was it available to register?

[dzohrob]

Thanks! We bought it from its "original" owner. We had the .it domain but thought it was worth it go for the .com.

[newtonapple]

Looks a lot like http://www.readshout.com/.

[dookie]

awesome service, now all i need is more friends

[rohamg]

I think having public accounts or "topics" you can follow would be a great step to fill in the gap for folks without many (interesting enough) friends on the system