Πως τον μήνυσε το Facebook

I'm a software engineer, my last job was at Apple but for the last two years I've been working on my own startup called Mailana. The name comes from 'Mail Analysis', and my goal has been to use the data sitting around in all our inboxes to help us in our day-to-day lives. I spent the first year trying (and failing) to get a toe-hold in the enterprise market. Last year I moved to Boulder to go through the Techstars startup program, where I met Antony Brydon, the former CEO of Visible Path. He described the immense difficulties they'd faced with the enterprise market, which persuaded me to re-focus on the consumer side.

I'd already applied the same technology to Twitter to produce graphs showing who people talked to, and how their friends were clustered into groups. I set out to build that into a fully-fledged service, analyzing people's Twitter, Facebook and webmail communications to understand and help maintain their social networks. It offered features like identifying your inner circle so you could read a stream of just their updates, reminding you when you were falling out of touch with people you'd previously talked to a lot, and giving you information about people you'd just met.

It was the last feature that led me to crawl Facebook. When I meet someone for the first time, I'll often Google their name to find their Twitter and LinkedIn accounts, and maybe Facebook too if it's a social contact rather than business. I wanted to automate that Googling process, so for every new person I started communicating with, I could easily follow or friend them on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. My first thought was to use one of the search engine APIs, but I quickly discovered that they only offer very limited results compared to their web interfaces.

I scratched my head a bit and thought "well, how hard can it be to build my own search engine?". As it turned out, it was very easy. Checking Facebook's robot.txt, they welcome the web crawlers that search engines use to gather their data, so I wrote my own in PHP (very similar to this Google Profile crawler I open-sourced) and left it running for about 6 months. Initially all I wanted to gather was people's names and locations so I could search on those to find public profiles. Talking to a few other startups they also needed the same sort of service so I started looking into either exposing a search API or sharing that sort of 'phone book for the internet' information with them.

Διαβάστε τη συνέχεια εδώ.

South Park λέμε. Τα λένε όλα. Δεν καταλαβαίνουν τίποτα.