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Crazy: I'm 10k away from 100k pvs on my Aggregation Journalism/reverse-engineer FB's algo/fun project chronoto.pe.
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Which means that my Aggregations Journalism+Sharing to Facebook project will likely become the most successful side project I've done so far
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Which is just awesome and wild. It's also just led to some strange also wonderful, but totally unexpected things.
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Over the year+, ~a dozen people messaged me on FB out of the blue, some I've had no contact w/ for years, & thanked me for sharing links.
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Which is humbling, unexpected, and still sort of surprising to me whenever it happens. Or when someone recommends my FB to someone else.
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It is very weird to me b/c the original idea was to collect stats for a year & shut it down, but now I'm wondering if I should do more w/it
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Beyond a bunch of stats geeks I never imagined anyone would care about the project. I was honestly worried I wouldn't get that many clicks
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So, a good thing overall though. What's next for it? Not sure. Something fun!
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Whatever the next stage is, I'm probably going to try and make some money w/it at the same time though. So that'll be exciting.
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Really don't have much of an idea on how to do that yet. So, more adventures to have!
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Oh also, I finally discovered why, for most cases, you sometimes see a link shortner as the source on a FB share instead of canonical source
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Turns out Facebook doesn't crawl through canonical headers or redirects when people share with a mobile device. Likely to speed things up.
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Or to save the user some data, which is a nice thought.
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But! It does use the cached data for the share card associated w/the canonical URL. A clever hack taking advantage of FB's massive userbase