Show HN: Firefeed - A Twitter clone built with Firebase

In case anyone is confused, it requires Facebook, so if you block FB, it will be pretty much an empty page with some footer links. I assumed it had crashed. But they assumed I allowed facebook.<p>Might be good to have something show up in case you can't reach facebook.

We built Firefeed to show how easy it is to build realtime apps with Firebase. We've put up a detailed explanation of how we built it on the about page: <a href="http://firefeed.io/about.html" rel="nofollow">http://firefeed.io/about.html</a><p>The code is all open source and on Github, please feel free to fork and reuse the project. Pull requests are welcome!

Firebase looks really cool, but my first impression the moment I see that you end up building everything in a way where it is tightly coupled to the servers of a startup that does not have years of profitability yet (or even published pricing), is that there's no way I'd put anything but toy/demo's on it for a <i>long</i> time.<p>It <i>seems</i> like the type of thing that'd do great with the option of a self-hosted server, and it also seems like the type of thing that'll see open source clones of pretty quickly, though. But I'd actually be vastly more comfortable paying Firebase to host my apps if I knew there was an open source fallback for their server component.

Going through the GitHub repository at firebase/firefeed right now. This looks pretty slick for 500 lines of code.

Sign in with Facebook - nope

Anybody else getting error connecting?<p><pre><code> ➜ ~ curl --head http://firefeed.io/about.html HTTP/1.0 503 Service Unavailable Server: squid/3.1.14 Mime-Version: 1.0 Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2012 01:33:50 GMT Content-Type: text/html Content-Length: 3542 X-Squid-Error: ERR_DNS_FAIL 0 Vary: Accept-Language Content-Language: en X-Cache: MISS from row44proxy-postauth Via: 1.0 row44proxy-postauth (squid/3.1.14) Connection: keep-alive</code></pre>

neat. Can I be the first to recommend that you peruse the federation specs (OStatus/Tent.io, also there is a w3 working group mailing list <a href="http://www.w3.org/community/fedsocweb/" rel="nofollow">http://www.w3.org/community/fedsocweb/</a>) and try to solve the silo/walled garden issue?<p>to elaborate, I think there is a huge future in what I call <i>Status Update Services</i>, and I think the trend will be for organizations to move away from the incumbent service providers towards infrastructure under their own control (as in the e-mail model.)

Does it really require Facebook to use? Don't really want to create an account just to see what this is all about.

Great job FireBase team. Think I am going to try this for the <a href="http://commando.io" rel="nofollow">http://commando.io</a> status feed. Simply host on my CDN. Would love to have GitHub auth as well though.

Seems to be down here unfortunately. Would love to see this!

I only see a stripe at the top and two links at the bottom (which are also very near the top of the page). Using Chrome.

Very nice.

this is brilliant

apparently not webscale?