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!

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!

Tags: rapleaf, thunderbird, api,

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!

The fastest growing demographic on social networks are moms between 35 and 45 years old. These women are putting up pictures of their kids (Johnny at baseball practice, Susie at soccer, the family in Disney World, etc.) and using these social networks (especially MySpace) to essentially make family home pages and share them with friends and relatives. They are decorating their pages, making RockYou slide shows, and using lots of widgets.

Men over 35 are just not that into social networks (yet) except on some rare examples like LinkedIn.

While both younger women and younger men have both joined social networks in drives, the younger women are much more active than the younger men. My hypothesis is that a lot of the younger men are spending their spare computer time playing video games. Women tend to enjoy casual games more and most social networks are essentially a huge casual games network. ]]> http://blog.rapleaf.com/2008/01/07/women-and-men-on-social-networks/feed/ http://blog.rapleaf.com/2007/12/22/hbase-presentation-at-rapleaf-hq-rocked/ http://blog.rapleaf.com/2007/12/22/hbase-presentation-at-rapleaf-hq-rocked/#comments Sat, 22 Dec 2007 20:06:44 +0000 dscudder Rapleaf Updates http://blog.rapleaf.com/2007/12/22/hbase-presentation-at-rapleaf-hq-rocked/ 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

]]> http://blog.rapleaf.com/2007/12/22/hbase-presentation-at-rapleaf-hq-rocked/feed/ http://blog.rapleaf.com/2007/11/21/import-contacts-with-the-rapleaf-address-book-api/ http://blog.rapleaf.com/2007/11/21/import-contacts-with-the-rapleaf-address-book-api/#comments Wed, 21 Nov 2007 21:49:38 +0000 dscudder New Feature http://blog.rapleaf.com/2007/11/21/import-contacts-with-the-rapleaf-address-book-api/ 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.

Tags: addressbook, socialgraph, api

- 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

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

Tags: opensocial, rapleaf

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.

Tags: rapleaf, privacy, onlinereputation

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)

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

If you go to a Rapleaf profile, you can scroll over an attribute to see its source. For example, if you scroll over the Gender attribute, you will see the text “Gender found via: sitename” under the information area. Additionally, if the source is one of the sites listed under the profile’s “Memberships” section, the corresponding site will be highlighted.

If information was found on multiple sites, we’ll tell you every site that we found it on.

Screenshot:

Information sources will help you better utilize Rapleaf to manage your online information - by pointing you to the sources of the info, you can easily correct any wrong information that you may have out there.

Tags: rapleaf, privacy,

The new PHP Classifieds 7.3 will be coming out soon and we’re excited that there will be Rapleaf functionality available to those who download or purchase the new software. It is super easy to activate Rapleaf for PHP Classifieds - all you need to do is register for an API Key with us and then plug your API key into the Rapleaf section of your classifieds admin area.

Once activated, a user’s Rapleaf score is displayed in the listing details and user details across your site. Rapleaf is another great way to increase trust among your classified site users and scare away potential fraudsters, and we’re excited to be part of a great classifieds software package!

Tags: rapleaf, phpclassifieds, partner

The other day my good friend Tim Brennan was telling me about a cool way he used Rapleaf to manage his online information. Tim is a power Facebook user, and he forgot that he had an old MySpace profile which he no longer used anymore. He also had incorrect information on his MySpace page – he moved last year to a new town.

When Tim searched himself on Rapleaf, his profile showed the link to his old MySpace page that he previously forgot about. At that point, it was an easy move to sign back into MySpace and close his account. After all, he no longer used it and it also contained outdated information. Why would he want anyone to see it? For Tim, online reputation management is especially important as he begins a career search during his senior year at Babson. Potential employers may be searching social networks and the web to learn more about him before hiring.

Tim found Rapleaf simple and useful – it alerted him to his information online, and pointed him to the source of any incorrect or outdated information. . We’re psyched to see people use Rapleaf as a tool to learn where they have online information and better manage that info.

Tags: rapleaf, privacy, onlinereputation

Many businesses on their site are already taking advantage of Rapleaf’s ratings – APS in San Marcos, TX is an example of a company that is already starting to leave ratings for current and past customers. Over time, these customers return the rating and merchants are able to start building their online reputation that can be showcased to future customers.

Another great and unique part about our partnership with Merchant Circle is that we display links to Merchant Circle pages on Rapleaf profiles. So if you search an email on Rapleaf and they also have a page on Merchant Circle, you can click right through to learn more about their business on the Merchant Circle site.

It’s a perfect match for promoting trust in commerce, and we’re definitely thrilled to help thousands of small businesses grow and manage their online reputation.

Tags: rapleaf, partners, merchantcircle

Start-ups often make mistakes. But millions of users, consumers, bloggers, critics, etc. set us right when we make wrong choices. It shows they care. Good start-ups evaluate the feedback and iterate to receive new feedback … resulting in a positive feedback loop (even when the feedback itself isn’t always positive).

Over the last two weeks, Rapleaf received a lot of feedback. Most of it unsolicited and by people who have no relationship with the company (this is the best kind of input as it gives a much needed and different perspective).

What do we do?

Rapleaf searches the Internet on people much like some of the more well-publicized services such as ZoomInfo, Wink, and Spock. Rapleaf is a giant system that evaluates billions of pieces of information on over 50 million people, growing by a few hundred thousand people a day. This is a lot of information.

People are sometimes taken aback because of the breadth and depth of Rapleaf’s search. Unlike some of the other services that search on name, our search is based on email address. We are essentially the largest, deepest, and fastest email search engine.

But we do more…

We gather this information to allow users to control it. At least, that is what we want to do. But as many people - like Judi Sohn, Marshall Kirkpatrick, and others - pointed out, we definitely made a bunch of mistakes in this realm in the last few weeks.

Our Goals: to encourage freedom of data and allow user data, from profile information to social graphs to user preferences, to be 100% portable.

When we started the company there was a lot of buzz about portable reputations, but we didn’t realize at the time that one’s reputation is not just what someone says about you on eBay, but also who you hang out with, what you participate in, etc. And reputation is very context dependent (Bill Clinton might have a reputation as a good leader but a bad husband).

So in the next few months you’ll see a whole bunch of products from Rapleaf that allow the community to more easily access information and build products on top of this information.

Now back to our mistakes and how we corrected for them…

All this data about me is scary:

There is a lot of information about people living on pockets all over the web. Everyone has an online/web footprint. And it is accessible if someone really wants to research someone – the information is publicly available – but it takes a lot of time to find.

Rapleaf automates this search process. We search billions of pages on blogs, social networks, forums, etc. for information on people. And a little over a month ago, we started making this information public on Rapleaf.com

Some people did not understand how we found their info and were worried that this info was going to be public, even though the info was already public. Others were concerned that their info was just plain wrong. The common denominator was not understanding where this info was coming from.

Yesterday we cooked up an idea to solve this - we are going to tell you where we obtained the info. Essentially all info will be attributed to a source and that way you can correct it at the source. We haven’t started coding this yet, but look for this change in the next few weeks.

“You’ve been searched” emails:

We send emails to people after they are searched on Rapleaf.com. We send the emails every Monday night if they were searched the week before. We do this because we want to give the person who is searched on Rapleaf the opportunity to manage their information and privacy and to give them the opportunity to opt out or to change something (such as not displaying their age). Since we gather this information on people, it is important to let them know about it.

Last week we also made a decision to send the “you’ve been searched” emails to people that were searched for in Upscoop, a service we run that allows you to upload all your friends and find out what social networks they are on. In retrospect, this was really stupid and very wrong for doing this without any controls. Very very wrong. But at the time, it seemed like a really good idea for some reason. The problem is many people who use Upscoop were unaware that their contacts would receive a courtesy email.

Again, we were wrong. Now we iterate. And we ask for forgiveness.

We stopped sending the Upscoop been-searched emails yesterday. If we decide to re-enact this, we will likely give our users the ability to opt-out of sending email to their contacts. In addition, we will likely not send more than one “been-searched” email to someone more than once a quarter.

A few people also asked us to stop sending the been-searched emails on Rapleaf.com. We debated the merits of that request internally and came to the conclusion that this is a good feature (the vast majority of the feedback on this have been very positive). People should know if their information is available for others to see. But we’ll limit these emails to maximum of once a quarter.

Opt-out:

We always had an easy system to get information removed from Rapleaf. You email our customer service and we immediately restrict all your information. Simple. However, we also had an additional (and onerous) system to completely delete the information about oneself. As a start-up, we looked at how some larger, more established companies were handling opt-outs and did exactly what they did.

In retrospect, this doesn’t make sense, as highlighted by Matt Roberts. Since we’re already removing information off the Rapleaf.com site when we get an email, we should just delete the information. So we amended our privacy policy to make it much easier to get out of Rapleaf’s system if you want to.

Multiple privacy policies:

Previously, we had three different privacy policies for Rapleaf, Upscoop, and TrustFuse - our B2B data provider (see below). We originally did this because we thought we would have shorter and easier-to-understand policies which were service-specific. This created a sense of mistrust due to the lack of transparency and just didn’t make any sense. Not at all. It became apparent when I talked to Stefanie Olsen (of CNET) on the phone last week – she was very confused with what info applied to what site. Stefanie is very smart – so we figured that if she was confused, millions of people will equally be confused.

So we changed it. We created one comprehensive privacy policy and released it last Friday (August 31). It is still a serious work in progress and we’ll likely need to make edits to it, but it is a big improvement and we look forward to receiving feedback so we can iterate further.

API v2 and Project TrustFuse:

After working on it for many months, we announced our V2 API (aka Project TrustFuse) last week. We’ve been working on Project TrustFuse for the better part of the year, and we’re glad to get the first rev out.

Our API allows people to do en masse Rapleaf lookups to better help their users. This is an open data platform for developers to build products on top of. For instance, I heard someone was working on a WordPress plug-in to easily attach social network information to blog comments … I’m really looking forward to seeing that.

Like other well-known APIs (for instance, Google Maps API) we give a certain number of searches for free so consumers can build cool apps. People that are doing lots of searches on a monthly basis pay a little bit of money per lookup. This is how we generate revenue.

And we’ll even give heavy users the ability to do batch lookups and provide aggregate reports of the information. And yes, these heavy users and companies may use this information for marketing purposes to give their users and better offers when they visit their sites. But they also use this information to provide a better user experience on their sites, to adjust their fraud algorithms, work on eliminating captchas for the masses, enable political candidates to better interact with voters … to name a few examples.

Rapleaf’s new V2 API is going to help enable the Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web to become a reality.

But we screwed up here too. We’ve been massively secretive about what we were up to (working in dark caves night and day) to prevent competitors from doing something similar. We should have been more confident in our abilities (we have the best engineers on the planet) and been more public about what we are up to.

We’re doing that now: detailing Project TrustFuse and the Rapleaf V2 API. And we’ll be doing more on this front to build clarity and to let thousands of people write software on top of the data.

What else we need to do:

We’re currently assembling a privacy advisory board to advise us when privacy related matters (such as the ones over the last couple weeks) occur. While we’re confident we’ll make lots of mistakes in the future, we want to ensure we have some trusted feedback on new products and features we are releasing.

We also want to give bloggers and community leaders the ability to get an early preview of the products we are releasing. This way, you can give your feedback BEFORE it happens (and probably stop us from pushing a lot of stupid ideas). If you are interested, email reputation@rapleaf.com and we’ll add you to the list.

And yes, OpenID is coming too.

We sincerely apologize to those that were offended, felt their privacy was violated, or lost trust in Rapleaf. You’ll see, we’ll make it up to you and do you proud.

Overtime we’ll continue to educate and explain the uses of Rapleaf and how individuals empower themselves. Check out our blog over the next few weeks to as we’ll chronicle how others have used Rapleaf for their benefit.

It is humbling being wrong

I remember in high school, I always wanted to be right. You remember when you were younger…you thought you were smarter than everyone and you hated being wrong. But as you get older, you realize it is inevitable to be wrong and if you are trying lots of things, you are going to be wrong often.

It is humbling being wrong, and we’ve been wrong a lot at Rapleaf. This experience of receiving all this feedback has been extremely helpful to our product development and we really appreciate all the time that people spent putting together extremely thoughtful advice. Hopefully we can continue to iterate, respond, change, get feedback back from you, and iterate again (feedback can be sent to reputation@rapleaf.com).

- Auren

p.s. - Special thanks to all those who already and continue to give us feedback including:

Matt Blumberg (http://onlyonce.blogs.com/onlyonce/2007/09/personal-reputa.html)

The Customer (http://thecustomer.co.uk/marketing/customer-20-i-own-my-privacy)

Dean Donaldson (http://deandonaldson.blogspot.com/2007/09/trustfuse-igniting-time-bomb-on-your.html)

David Evans (http://theprogressbar.com/archives/2007/08/reputation_and_social_networking/)

Henry Farrell (http://crookedtimber.org)

Nathan Gilliatt (http://net-savvy.com/jobseeker/marketing/check-yourself-at-rapleaf.html)

Tish Grier (http://spap-oop.blogspot.com/2007/09/perils-of-social-networking-pt-2.html)

Andre H. (http://n0comment.wordpress.com/2007/09/03/the-internet-and-privacy-get-yourself-removed-from-rapleaf-quickly/)

Denis Hancock (http://www.wikinomics.com/blog/index.php/2007/09/01/rapleaf-and-the-growing-privacy-challenge/)

Keyser Infinity (http://keyser-infinity.livejournal.com)

Junkdepot (http://blog.junkdepot.com/browse/updates/junkdepot-fights-fraud/)

Marshall Kirkpatrick (http://marshallk.com/)

Liminal Librarian (http://www.lisjobs.com/liminal/2007/09/walking-line.html)

Adriana Lukas (http://www.mediainfluencer.net/2007/09/master-slave-relationship/)

Natalie M. (http://sevenorora.livejournal.com/42885.html)

Randy McDonald (http://rfmcdpei.livejournal.com/)

Kristen Nicole (http://mashable.com/2007/09/04/rapleaf-privacy/)

Matt Roberts (http://mattroberts.com/)

Stefanie Olsen (http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9588_22-6206023.html)

Akkam’s Razor (http://www.akkamsrazor.com/)

Judi Sohn (http://www.momathome.com/)

Killer Startups (http://www.killerstartups.com/User-Gen-Content/rapleaf–Do-You-Have-A-Bad-Reputation/)

Technology News Daily (http://news.techvine.org/2007/09/05/rapleaf-changes-questionable-privacy-policy-in-response-to-recent-inquisition/)

Weblogsky (http://weblogsky.com/2007/09/being_a_public_character.html)

Lauren Weinstein (http://www.securitypractice.org/2007/09/fw-ip-re-at-rapleaf-your-personals-are.html)

And whole bunch of other blogs written in German, Hebrew, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, French, Dutch, Italian, and English four-letter words.

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