Octazen: What The Heck Did Facebook Just Buy Exactly, And Why? | Hacker News Reader

Octazen: What The Heck Did Facebook Just Buy Exactly, And Why?

techcrunch.com

76 pointsvaksel25 comments

Given the cloak-and-dagger and "redeployment" line, my guess would be that Octazen is going to be part of an anti-scraping team at Facebook to avoid Facebook getting "Octazen'd" as much as possible.

Hah, that, or they just scraped a ton of fb data and threatned to start selling it.

Rapleaf already does that...

I perma-deleted my Facebook account last week.

Whatever the motivation of this acquisition, Facebook simply doesn't appear to do enough to look after my privacy, especially given the personal and sometimes sensitive nature of the data they are handling.

The notion that they want to expand into online payments and banking is laughable without a dramatic rethink of their approach to data.

For a company which built their reputation on protecting their users' privacy to follow the path it has is tantamount to business suicide.

You think facebook actually deleted your information?

When you cancel the account, they just mark it as cancelled. Your login still works, and if you do log back in, it reactivates everything.

There's also a perma-delete a couple of levels deep in the help system that will deactivate your account forever. (Like deactivation, it probably doesn't delete anything, though.)

Can you be more specific about how FB is lax with your data? I mean, first and foremost, they don't sell data, which is more than you can say for a lot of other companies. Secondly they provide extensive control over the privacy of various parts of your profile. Facebook is way more privacy conscious than other companies, so I just don't see the foundation for your criticism.

FWIW, i used to work at Spock, which was a "people search engine". Spock harvested a lot of data from social networks and FB was a nut we never cracked.

I once set my facebook email as a super old hotmail address all the way back from high school. I wanted all the notification spam sent to an email I would never check. I later get a "suggestion" to friend a very random person with a vaguely familiar name who I have 0 mutual friends with.

The name was an alumini of a college I didn't go to, who I once emailed to setup an admissions interview with.

Facebook clearly has already been scraping email headers (or at least had an agreement with microsoft to do so).

More likely, that person just kept your old email around around in their address book, and then mass imported it into facebook when they joined.

Yes, I can confirm Facebook does this. When you import your email address book, Facebook stores it forever.

I don't know if they keep your credentials around, too, and periodically refresh their data. That'd be doubly invasive, but it wouldn't surprise me. :)

that would make sense. because the timing happened when I switched it to the ancient hotmail address, it could have his imported data still stored and rechecked to find my old email where it hadnt before.

Facebook only supported 3 or 4 import formats, but Octazen supports at least 21 different services. Maybe they wanted the technology as well as the people who know how to use the technology? Likely cheaper and faster than getting 3 to 4 engineers on the task and then waiting 6 months.

I doubt Facebook cares about importing address book from N additional email services -- they're growing at a rate of like 300-500k new users per day, and accelerating.

So it seems unlikely that was the driving rationale behind the acquisition.

Just to point others, facebook is preparing for Project Titan. http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/05/facebooks-project-titan-a-f...

Octazen is (was?) essentially a Facebook Connect competitor and since they were acquired several of their core services have been disconnected.

This reads to me as a strategy about whittling the market to one option, Facebook's, and not much else.

I don't think thats it, Octazen wasn't really a facebook connect competitor at all. They sold scraping scripts that let you login and grab data.

http://web.archive.org/web/20080619054335/http://www.octazen...

I think you're right - they are not a direct competitor.

However, their API sets eliminated the need for Facebook Connect because you could make virtually any data set portable, check it out in the wild:

http://www.traderjaw.com/invite.php

or google "Powered by Octazen Solutions Invite Engine"

The technical specs are significantly different, but they solve a large, overlapping set of distribution problems.

If you want to build a viral app/game/whatever you have to pick your platform. Traditionally, if you did it on the web, you'd use something like Octazen to download address books and send invites.

That's how almost every non-FB viral startup bootstrapped itself, including Facebook!

So Facebook just made it a LOT harder to build something viral without using Platform or Connect.

I've used Octazen's products in the past, and they make some solid libraries that are easy to incorporate, particular for things like address importation.

Does their software violate terms of services for the services they scrape? I don't particular care if they do, just that it would seem like a really sketchy acquisition for a company like Facebook which already drawn privacy-related criticism

It would be interesting to see a review and comparison of contact importer services, nothing the white hats, black hats, and gray hats.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occams_razor

Can anyone suggest an alternative high-quality contact importer?

http://www.improsys.com http://www.cloudsponge.com http://openinviter.com

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