Meet PostPost, a real-time ‘Facebook newspaper’

Data management and rapid application deployment solutions company TigerLogic has just launched PostPost, a real-time “social newspaper” that’s created from the links, photos and videos your friends share on Facebook.

In essence, what PostPost does is take your Facebook newsfeed, but presents it in a way that is more manageable. PostPost also uses the Yolink search API to help you find context and backlinks within your paper.

PostPost — which shouldn’t be confused with the similarly named PostPo.st — resembles the mobile app Pulse and the iPad app Flipboard — the difference being, PostPost is accessible through your web browser.

As more of us use social networks like Facebook and Twitter find and share news, the traditional RSS reader is slowly getting replaced with these types of solutions.

On the surface, PostPost isn’t unlike services such as paper.li. Paper.li also just launched Facebook support for its product, but the approach that the two services take is a bit different.

PostPost uses the jQuery Masonry plugin created by David DeSandro. This makes it possible for links, videos and photos imported from the Facebook Open Graph API to be displayed in a way that resembles a more traditional broadsheet newspaper. It also means you can adjust the size of your browser window and the sections will expand or contract as needed.

Watch Postpost’s introductory video on YouTube

This also means you can easily switch between “sections” like videos, photos and links. PostPost is planning on adding more sections and sorting options to the service as time goes on.

From a technical perspective, what makes PostPost interesting to us is that it’s truly built off of Facebook’s Open Graph API. Originally the team at TigerLogic built PostPost in Python, using Google App Engine. Then, the team transitioned into PHP.

Finally, the decision was made to just use JavaScript, which means PostPost has the potential to scale quite well. After all, it’s basically using the existing Facebook infrastructure to host content, while utilizing JavaScript for the display layer and user controls.

In practical terms, the decision to use JavaScript means that PostPost is able to fetch and display news stories in real time. The web app doesn’t have to fetch data from the server at regular intervals; it can be updated in real time. However, the disadvantage is that the app can be at the liberty of the Facebook API.

That means that the first time you launch the site, it can sometimes take a bit of time before you can see your information. It also means that if the Facebook API fails, the app fails too.

Still, for a beta web app, we think this concept has a ton of promise. We really like the search integration with Yolink. Yolink has a lot of potential in terms of finding and indexing the backlinks within stories. This shows just how Yolink can be used in other web apps.

We also like how tightly the product is integrated with Facebook. You can like and comment on links, photos or videos directly from its panel. You can also choose to block posts from a certain news source or poster.

The ability to customize your news sources isn’t as vast as something like paper.li, but it does offer a very easy way to pinpoint and visualize your newsfeed.

PostPost is free and just requires you to log in with your Facebook credentials. What do you think of this new wave of social news aggregators?

Source: MASHABLE.com.