We brought on another superb engineer…this time a CMU grad involved in every aspect of campus/student life (literally 14 campus organizations, ranging from a capella groups to student senate to campus advisory committees - oh vey!). Emily Leathers joins us from the East, or rather the Middle East I should say, where she spent a year at the CMU Qatar campus. In fact, when we brought Emily in for an in-house interview, she had the raw nerves of steel to not only sustain a full-day flight, but then undergo our rigorous interview process while on a disorienting 12 hour time change. Pretty amazing in our eyes.

One of the great things about Emily is that she likes to cook and bake…and we like to eat, so it’s a perfect combination. She’s also a fan of the arts and crafts, so hopefully her craftwork will make our office more festive and flavorful (beyond our coveted pirate flag). In summary, Emily is pretty cool, and we’re happy to have her on board!

BitStrips is a new site that just launched at SXSW. Think of it as a YouTube for comic strips. Anyone can go on, create comics using their super simple comic strip creator, and also be part of the community and create member profiles. It’s free, really easy to use, and an excellent distraction from work .

And what would an online community be without the ability to invite and find your friends? Using our Address Book API, BitStrips built a nifty friend invite feature that allows users to find contacts already on the site, or send invites to friends from Gmail, AOL, Hotmail, and Yahoo contact lists. As the BitStrips’ userbase grows and grows, they’re developing a sweet catalog of comics.

We’re happy to help them out with our free and easy to use API. BitStrips even took time out of their busy beta launch to create a comic for us Rapleaf folks!

So checkout BitStrips and create some comics with characters that look less desperate than that guy on the left!

We brought Dan in as an intern, and boy was that a steal. He set the bar for all future interns. Customer service…check. Recruiting…check. Product…check. Marketing…check. But what blew us away was his tenacity and ability to adapt and pick up business development…which wasn’t even part of his internship. He knew what he wanted and he went after it. As an intern, he not only sourced but helped closed some pretty decent sized deals - a rainmaker in the making. And now we’re blessed to have him on our business development team as a full-time member and early employee of Rapleaf. We were fortunate enough to manage Dan (or rather he managed us) and we are all blessed to have him on our team. Congratulations Dan. Hurry up and graduate and help us blaze this trail!

Rapleaf Address Book API users benefit from the easy to use functionality of our API. It’s a simple API call to integrate into any site, and since Rapleaf maintains an up-to-date code on the importer, you don’t need to spend time building your own importers or doing code maintenance.

Mimi Sun has built a PHP Client Library for the API, making the Address Book API even easier to integrate into your site.  You can see a demo, sample code, and download the full kit here.

The Address Book API allows for a user to import their email contact list (from Gmail, Yahoo!, AOL, and Hotmail) into any site. Our API is used on dozens of sites and applications, and is a way for users to invite friends to a site, share content with people in their address book, and import their social relationships.    

Thanks to Mimi for helping make this available. If there are any questions about working with this client library, please email developer@rapleaf.com.

One of the exciting parts about our APIs at Rapleaf is seeing what creative tools and applications other developers are building with them.

Daniel Thomas has taken the initiative to build Rapleaf 4 Thunderbird - a simple plugin using our Person API. It allows you to learn more about the people in your inbox (via their online memberships). Thunderbird is a desktop email client and in using our API, the plugin displays links to a person’s online profiles in your incoming email.

It’s free to download and install. Once installed, you will need to register for a Rapleaf API key and input that into your plugin preferences. From there, you’re off and running. Daniel has posted full instructions on his site.

To download the beta version of Rapleaf 4 Thunderbird, you may go to the following link:

http://www.networklighthouse.com/attachments/045_rap4tb-0.4a.xpi

Thanks Daniel for building this!

Rapleaf hosted the first Bay Area Meetup for the DataPortability Workgroup at our offices yesterday. As the kickoff meeting, representatives of companies and organizations involved in the DataPortability movement not only laid the foundation and framework for future discussions, but they also were able to discuss technical, policy, evangelistic, and implementation efforts and implications of dataportability. Full detail eddescription and feedback on the event will be provided by our very own Manish Shah. Pictures of the event below.

We were glad to host such an exciting and fruitful event and we look forward to hosting future Dataportability discussions. And special thanks to Manish for representing Rapleaf, the ever-entertaining Marc Canter for scribing, J. Trent Adams for taking meticulous notes, and to Daniela Barbosa and Chris Saad for streaming and setting up the event!

We were lucky enough to team up with Powerset this week for a tech presentation on Hbase, discussing structured storage and Apache’s Hadoop project.

For those of you unfamiliar with Hbase, it’s all about storing massive amounts of data once you’re past the capacities of your conventional database. Hbase is an open-source implementation of bigtable storage, and is quickly growing popular among startups that are gathering and organizing lots of data (like Rapleaf!).

We had over 80 engineers in attendance at Rapleaf Headquarters in downtown SF. Jim Kellerman from Powerset started off the presentations, and then Bryan from Rapleaf rounded off the night with his own talk on Hbase. The audience also posed some great questions. Overall, it was a tremendous success and we hope to host many more tech community events in the near future.

Pictures from the evening along with links to the full presentation video are below. Also included are the presentations themselves. Special thanks to the folks at Powerset for helping pull this off, and also to the guests that made it such an awesome event.

Part I: http://www.vimeo.com/445542

Part II: http://www.vimeo.com/445554

Part III: http://www.vimeo.com/445569

Presentations:

Powerset’s Hbase Presentation

Rapleaf’s Hbase Presentation

The Rapleaf API, a core component Rapleaf, allows any company or developer to access information on a person and include that in their own site. Such information includes memberships, reputation, and demographic info.

We’re excited to release the Rapleaf Address Book API. It is super easy to use and can help any site increase its reach by allowing users to import their contacts into your site, and further benefit from portable social graphs.

The Address Book API allows you to:

- Ask your users for their email login credentials (for Gmail, Yahoo!, AOL, Hotmail/MSN)

- Securely pass the credentials to the Rapleaf Address Book API

- Obtain the names and email addresses of all the contacts in that person’s address book

It’s all free and really easy to use. User’s privacy is guarded and password information is never stored.

You can find the Address Book API documentation here: http://www.rapleaf.com/apidoc/v2/abook

p.s. - Combine the Address Book API with the Rapleaf Person API to get social network memberships and demographics of each email in that address book.

We recently gathered data and released stats on users of MySpace, LinkedIn, Friendster, Plaxo, and Hi5 – five social networks on the OpenSocial platform. We also gathered data on Facebook users. For instance, did you know:

- The greatest overlap between OpenSocial container sites exists between MySpace and Hi5, in which 43% of Hi5 users also use MySpace.
- Facebook users are 63% female and 36% male whereas the sites integrated with the OpenSocial platform are 61% female and 38% male
- 52% of Facebook users are 18-25, whereas 40% of the users are 18-25 for the five container sites on the OpenSocial platform
- Facebook users tend to use 2.9 major social networking sites on average whereas users of OpenSocial container sites tend to use 2.7 major social networking sites

Full in-depth data below:

Facebook Users
- 2.6 million users identified in Rapleaf
- 63% female, 36% male
- 17% <18 yrs, 52% 18-25 yrs, 21% 26-35 yrs, 5% 36-45 yrs, 5% >45 yrs
- 2.9 major social networking sites used on average
- 62% are on MySpace, 5% are on LinkedIn, 9% are on Friendster, 10% are on Plaxo, 22% are on Hi5

MySpace Users
- 11.3 million users identified in Rapleaf
- 63% female, 36% male
- 20% <18 yrs, 40% 18-25 yrs, 27% 26-35 yrs, 7% 36-45 yrs, 6% >45 yrs
- 2.4 major social networking sites used on average
- 15% are on Facebook, 2% are on LinkedIn, 9% are on Friendster, 6% are on Plaxo, 17% are on Hi5

LinkedIn Users
- 0.8 million users identified in Rapleaf
- 38% female, 61% male
- 2% <18 yrs, 9% 18-25 yrs, 49% 26-35 yrs, 24% 36-45 yrs, 16% >45 yrs
- 3.2 major social networking sites used on average
- 16% are on Facebook, 25% are on MySpace, 12% are on Friendster, 16% are on Plaxo, 8% are on Hi5

Friendster Users
- 2.3 million users identified in Rapleaf
- 58% female, 41% male
- 12% <18 yrs, 39% 18-25 yrs, 36% 26-35 yrs, 7% 36-45 yrs, 5% >45 yrs
- 3.0 major social networking sites used on average
- 10% are on Facebook, 44% are on MySpace, 5% are on LinkedIn, 5% are on Plaxo, 26% are on Hi5

Plaxo Users
- 1.3 million users identified in Rapleaf
- 62% female, 37% male
- 16% <18 yrs, 39% 18-25 yrs, 24% 26-35 yrs, 10% 36-45 yrs, 11% >45 yrs
- 3.6 major social networking sites used on average
- 20% are on Facebook, 53% are on MySpace, 11% are on LinkedIn, 9% are on Friendster, 15% are on Hi5

Hi5 Users
- 4.5 million users identified in Rapleaf
- 60% female, 39% male
- 21% <18 yrs, 44% 18-25 yrs, 23% 26-35 yrs, 6% 36-45 yrs, 6% >45 yrs
- 2.8 major social networking sites used on average
- 13% are on Facebook, 43% are on MySpace, 2% are on LinkedIn, 13% are on Friendster, 2% are on Plaxo

We currently have 60 million people in our databases and we searched those people across publicly accessible social networks, in which much of the data was obtained.

If there or any further inquiries on this data or other data we may have, please contact press@rapleaf.com

Also, developers may check out Rapleaf’s API v2 (for integrating people data into your site): http://www.rapleaf.com/developer

The buzz on the web over the last week has been the release of Google’s OpenSocial. OpenSocial is a mark-up language that developers can use to write applications on a host of sites. Companies that have committed to OpenSocial include MySpace, Bebo, Google, Hi5, Friendster, SixApart, and more.

OpenSocial creates a range of opportunities for companies, developers, and users to benefit from the social power of the web. Companies save resources by not having to code the same app for multiple sites. Users benefit because they can transport data across every site they use. At Rapleaf, we’re excited about OpenSocial and the mission of making data portable.

Our newly released API v2 allows companies and developers to access portable user data – memberships, demographics, and reputation – and import that data for use in their own sites. Any developer can ping our API with an email and we’ll return information on the person, including:

- Memberships: links to their social network profiles (Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc)

- Demographics: name, age, gender, location, and occupation

- Reputation: Rapleaf score and ratings

Site’s are already using this information to benefit their users – pulling in links to their social networks or automatically completing profile info.

As the mission of portable social graphs and identities evolve, we look forward to seeing sites and users benefit from the Rapleaf API and OpenSocial.

You can access the new Rapleaf API docs here

“I forgot I setup a membership with that other email address!”

Rapleaf is all about finding information related to a given email address. Often, people are surprised to find an outdated social network profile that is linked to one of their emails. But the other side of the issue is making sure you search all your email addresses with Rapleaf. You may have an email address that you no longer use, but other people know about that email and it may have information linked to it.

One example was my friend, who is in the process of having a background check done for her new job. She checked Rapleaf for her university email address, and was able to see her Facebook and LinkedIn profiles. However, she could remember that she created a MySpace profile back in high school and wasn’t sure why it did not show up on Rapleaf. We suggested she search her other email addresses that she used in high school, and she was eventually able to find that her MySpace profile was linked to her @yahoo.com email address. She then logged on to MySpace and made the necessary changes to her information.

The key take away is that Rapleaf searches based on an email address. We may find some of your memberships for a given email, but if you have used different email addresses to register on other sites, Rapleaf will not find those other memberships until you search that other email address.

If you are a Rapleaf member, you can also add more emails to your Rapleaf profile so Rapleaf can find all applicable memberships that you want to display. It’s easy to add more emails – just sign in and go to this page: http://www.rapleaf.com/PersonalInfo/manage_email

Rapleaf not only has the power to help you build your reputation, but we also provide tools to learn about what information you have out there on the internet. By staying on top of your information, you can better manage your online privacy and control your reputation online.

We’re extremely excited to welcome Eric Wong as the newest Rapleaf engineer! Eric hails from the sunny streets of San Francisco, and is a graduate of UCLA. He’s also an extreme biker – he is really determined and has biked for miles in some of the harshest conditions. Luckily for Eric, his work at Rapleaf will consist mostly of coding. Unluckily for the rest of Rapleaf, Eric is planning a team-building extreme biking trip for 2008.

Another Eric Wong notable: He is an excellent bread maker. We’re already fortunate to have the baking support of significant others, but we’re happy to bring some of that baking talent in-house with Eric. Bread is the preferred snack of the Rapleaf Gorilla.

He’s a former engineer at Zappos and we’re psyched to add him to the Rapleaf engineering squad. He’s already moving our software forward and building some awesome tools for Rapleaf! So give it up for Eric, the newest Rapleaf super engineer!

(PS – We’re still looking for more kick butt coders like Eric…check out our jobs page for the latest opportunities)

Rapleaf has a bunch of groups, organizations, causes, and candidates that are using our data to better democracy. But we still find that most actors in the political process really underestimate social networks.

So we put together a “social networks for dummies” PDF with some up-to-date stats on who is on these social networks and why someone involved in affecting change should care:

social networks and politics