deepkut

It's interesting that Josh Kopelman submitted this.

The request is harvesting data from Facebook. For users with a tremendous amount of data, batch requests must be made, so it can take a while sometimes.

Firefly fits in perfectly with the North Inc. (and Dan's) mentality, I love it:

--1. Address an outdated market: customer support for enterprises. Business doesn't need to be sexy.

--2. Make money now, not later. Sign up, pay now. For those willing to send an email, there's a demo available.

--3. No need to accept funding. North Inc. pushes products. Period.

--4. All the while, they're all still in school learning philosophy, finance, management, and much more.

Congrats to North Inc. on a successful launch. I can't wait to hear the numbers and read the many articles.

I'd love to contact some of these people as "Growth" is the focus of what I'm working on. Do you know any of these guys you're referencing?

Can I shoot you an email? Mine is tony at graphmuse.com

Here at GraphMuse (invite engine for Facebook apps), we hadn't heard of a "Growth Engineer" until we really looked into some of the people interested in our product.

Turns out that Growth Engineers are actually respected "higher-ups." You said it yourself too. That said, I think few people are familiar with this job title outside of SV.

Was it Facebook who started this trend?

NOTE: I'd increase the line spacing on your blog, it's a bit tight.

First off, thank you.

We thought about licensing it, and we'd probably feel comfortable doing so. However, the infrastructure required to run this is pretty intense and customized. We're actually pushing a patent for the infrastructure/technology behind it.

Ok, we will :)

Of course!

Facebook provides you the user's list of friends, and each friend's list of mutual friends with the user. From there, we construct the friend graph, and then run our clustering algorithm on it.

You're right about Facebook not providing friends of friends. Supposedly they used to back in the day, but not anymore.

How might we incorporate GraphMuse into the news feed?

I don't quite follow.

What do you mean by a 'list?' A Facebook list?

We might include that as a neat little tool in the near future for those interested.

What are your thoughts?

If you'd like to brainstorm, feel free to shoot me an email at

[email protected]

I have some ideas that are worth developing. In fact, we were using GraphMuse originally to determine entire fraternities and sororities. We listed 3,400 Greeks at UPenn in 3 weeks.

Feel free to check out Greekdex.com

or read about it here:

http://www.thedp.com/article/2012/02/new__directory_launched...

I really appreciate your kind words, thank you.

Are you a Facebook app developer? Are you interested in purposes other than sending invitations?

We've always wondered about this. We didn't think people would pay for something like that.

What about a way of creating all your G+ circles based on Facebook friend clusters as well?

Regarding security, good point. SSL is supported; however, we are still in the process of obtaining a secure certificate signed by a CA. Most browsers would not let the demo run SSL over AJAX so we have it temporarily disabled, but once we get a certificate, we will re-enable the SSL support for the API. At that point, one simply has to use https instead of http for API calls.

Thank you. We actually considered building a recruitment platform based on clusters.

That said, we don't know much about the recruitment industry.

What are your thoughts?

We hope to monetize this through selling our invite widget.

We're also in the process of determining our pricing scheme, which is why that is not detailed on the site yet.

This is a great point, and I respect your skepticism.

At this point, we're in the process of confirming our hypothesis with case studies.

We did launch this clustering algorithm for our previous venture, Greekdex.com, in which we determined entire fraternities and sororities given just one user's friend graph. Clusters were "completed" over time as more users signed up.

That said, it's obvious that members in fraternities and sororities tell their fellow brothers and sisters about the site that they just signed up for. Therefore, it's difficult to say that our clustering algorithm resulted in more users signing up.

tldr; we're working on confirming our hypothesis with case studies.

Hopefully you enjoyed the "reticulating splines" error at the very least? :)

I'm sorry about the error, I'm wondering why you received it.

-Do you have more than a small number of Facebook friends? That might be it.

Thank you!

Do you view the invites you receive as complete spam? I guess it might depend on the size of your college, and how open the college is to parties, events, etc.

Interesting.

We actually thought about offering this as a tool to a company like Paperless Post to speed up their process.

What do you think?

We just used it for the launch page as a neat way to catch the user's attention, so I can't make any grand claim about it. Not yet.

Arbor is pretty slick, but we haven't tested it out extensively. We have our eyes on d3.js and three.js as well.

What about making clusters correspond to waves of enemies in a game?

This would be an awesome text-based adventure game, yeah?

Yes, I see what you mean regarding app invites.

What if we were to identify your evangelists based on "cluster completion?" What I mean by this is that we'd look for clusters that go from being densely unregistered friend clusters to densely registered over time, and see which friend(s) were the catalyst(s).