Hey Hacker News!

Together with my partner in crime, Freddie Iboy (@freddieiboy), we set out to build the next step of a product that I launched 4 months ago. Matcha is the culmination for my extension, Chrome IG Story. Quick re-cap of the hack:

We invented our own mechanism of pseudo-fetching Instagram Stories from a particular location. There doesn't exist an API or a way to get a story from a location so we had to be creative and pioneer one. By expanding the reverse engineering of the private stories API used by my extension, we built a process that searches media on Instagram posted at a particular location, then we look to see if any of the users who posted that media have a story. We rely on the fact that someone posting a photo at a location within the last 24 hours probably has a photo on their story taken near that location as well.

It’s definitely scrappy but this means that we can potentially show Instagram Stories from any part of the world but technology is rarely enough--a great product can profoundly touch people around the world.

Freddie’s day job is a product designer at Tinder so he’s deeply fascinated by how technology can shape human behavior. He pushed for creating a new addictive TV product for a new generation. You can read more of his thoughts on his Medium article: https://medium.com/@FreddieIboy/introducing-matcha-watch-ins...

We both deeply respect the product team at Instagram and we’re big fans of how much they’ve pushed the Instagram product in the past year. This is our small contribution.

Btw, this is a beta launch so if some countries take a while to load, wait a minute, reload, or surf other countries. Also, performance might not be the best. We're working on optimizing everything since the browser is loading tons of stories. If you are in the US and have Top Live Videos enabled in your Instagram app, you can also watch (stream) Live Videos within Matcha - realtime comments and hearts coming soon.