http://blog.rapleaf.com Behind the tagline: "It is more profitable to be ethical" Mon, 17 Mar 2008 19:01:32 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en 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 ... http://blog.rapleaf.com/2008/03/17/emily-leathers-has-joined-the-rapleaf-engineering-ranks/ 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, ... http://blog.rapleaf.com/2008/03/11/bitstrips-launches-with-the-help-of-rapleaf%e2%80%99s-address-book-api/ 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 ... http://blog.rapleaf.com/2008/03/11/dan-scudder-rises-through-the-ranks/ 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 ... http://blog.rapleaf.com/2008/03/06/php-client-library-for-our-address-book-api/ 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 ... http://blog.rapleaf.com/2008/02/19/rapleaf-plugin-for-mozilla-thunderbird-displays-membership-info/ 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, ... http://blog.rapleaf.com/2008/02/08/dataportability-workgroup-meetup-kicks-off-with-a-bang/ From looking at the data provided by Rapleaf, women are much bigger users of social networks then men. Much bigger. 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 ... http://blog.rapleaf.com/2008/01/07/women-and-men-on-social-networks/ 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 ... http://blog.rapleaf.com/2007/12/22/hbase-presentation-at-rapleaf-hq-rocked/ 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 ... http://blog.rapleaf.com/2007/11/21/import-contacts-with-the-rapleaf-address-book-api/ 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 ... http://blog.rapleaf.com/2007/11/13/statistics-on-googles-opensocial-platform-end-users-and-facebook-users/ 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 ... http://blog.rapleaf.com/2007/11/08/opensocial-portable-data-and-rapleafs-api/ "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 ... http://blog.rapleaf.com/2007/10/26/privacy-related-uses-checking-all-your-email-addresses/ 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. ... http://blog.rapleaf.com/2007/10/22/super-engineer-eric-wong-is-employee-12/ 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 ... http://blog.rapleaf.com/2007/10/09/social-networks-and-political-process/ We promised a few weeks ago that we would tell you where the info on your Rapleaf profile was coming from - and we're happy now to release that functionality to the public. We've added a super simple way to see how Rapleaf obtained your profile info, and we point ... http://blog.rapleaf.com/2007/10/05/information-sources-now-on-rapleaf-profiles/ We are super psyched to announce that Rapleaf will be part of the first ever MashupChallenge, a 3-month contest that allows web developers to compete and build the best Mashup on the web. We’re making available Rapleaf API v2 in the contest – developers can access portable reputation and identity information ... http://blog.rapleaf.com/2007/10/01/rapleaf-api-%e2%80%93-mash-it-up-in-mashup-challenge/ PHP Classifieds is a great software that anyone can download to easily build and manage their own classifieds site. Its got all the great functionality of a classifieds system - templates, categories, field customization, and many more exciting features. The new PHP Classifieds 7.3 will be coming out soon and ... http://blog.rapleaf.com/2007/09/26/php-classifieds-now-with-rapleaf-module/ "Wow, I didn't even know I had a profile on that site!" 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 ... http://blog.rapleaf.com/2007/09/18/privacy-related-uses-deleting-outdated-social-network-profiles/ We’re happy to announce a new Rapleaf partner – Merchant Circle! Merchant Circle is an awesome site that lets businesses build a reputation, find new customers, and promote their own business. Rapleaf is a natural fit for the reputation part of their website – and all businesses on Merchant Circle ... http://blog.rapleaf.com/2007/09/13/merchant-circle-adds-rapleaf-to-business-pages/ We made lots of mistakes. And this is a long post that, in great detail, goes over our mistakes and what we plan to do about them. Start-ups often make mistakes. But millions of users, consumers, bloggers, critics, etc. set us right when we make wrong choices. It ... http://blog.rapleaf.com/2007/09/06/start-ups-privacy-and-being-wrong/