I recently received an email from a developer named Apoorv Saxena, asking if I could write about his newly developed app for Facebook. He stumbled upon my blog due to my past posting about Facebook marketing and newsfeed updates. As someone interested in helping entrepreneurial folks, I thought I’d share his email and a bit about the app he created, Newsfeed Search.
I’ll share with you what Apoorv shared with me after I asked him a bit more about the story behind the development of his app.
I am working as a Software Engineer at Directi. I love learning new technologies and implement the same in side-projects. It was sometime back, when I was searching for some good tutorials on Backbone.js, when I thought of browsing Smashing Magazine’s Facebook page to get hands on some tutorials that they are suggesting for learning Backbone.js. When I started to go through their Facebook Page, it took a great deal of effort from my side to actually filter the articles that were related to Backbone.js. It is really not possible to search Facebook Newsfeed for a particular term manually, especially when the page is very popular and creates a post in every X minutes of time.
In his searching, Apoorv also noticed some significant shortcomings in Facebook’s functionality.
- Searching a newsfeed manually requires a lot of time, and effort, plus you might miss out on some necessary information.
- Also, Likes, Comments or Shares are not currently used in any way by Facebook as of now, may be at the backend to generate the best posts to display to the user when they are posted, but what happens after a day or two? The posts are no longer seen in your newsfeed, and sorting them on basis of Likes, Comments, Shares or Creation Time is just not possible.
- Also, to search for a post that pre-dates to long time back, will require you to search post by post and look out for their creation time.
That compelled me to create a solution that automates the entire work flow for providing search results that matches the user’s query, sorts the results on the basis of Likes, Comments, Shares or Creation Time and also search for a post with time reference.
- It allows searching in any Newsfeed (you can search inside your Newsfeed, your friend’s Newsfeed or any Facebook Page’s Newsfeed)
- It suggests you the Facebook Page to Search into or a Friend matching your query, thus giving you
- Also, Facebook never uses the Law of Nature (i.e. the Survival of the Fitest), i.e. to display posts first which are receiving the maximum number of comments, likes or shares, though this application allows you to sort the Search Results by any of the mentioned parameters
- Looking for a Search Query might have loads of related posts, though the application allows you to mention a particular date to search across, thus reducing your time and effort spent.
Take a look at an example of the search feature in action. It’s actually very easy to use and I was impressed with the results it provided.
Hopefully this comes in handy for someone. I know I’ve found myself scrolling through a page’s posts in search of some thing I wanted to dig up. I’m all for innovation, so I’m glad to publicize someone’s efforts to improve Facebook!
