

FullContact API gives marketing superpowers to growth hackers - jonnym1ller
http://blog.maptia.com/fullcontact-marketing-superpower/

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TamDenholm
Wasnt this the same thing someone was blogging about a few days ago and
refused to use it because of the creepy way it tracked everyone?

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apinstein
No. Full Contact cross-references an email address to _publicly_ available
information. Full Contact basically just automates a legitimate public search
on information shared with intent between a user and a site owner.

The things that caused fury (and rightly so) the other day were a handful of
tracking systems that use a single cookie across multiple sites (some with
contact info) to break anonymity for the any site in the network. So the user
_think_ they're anonymous, but they are in fact personally identifiable to the
site owner.

BIG difference.

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lucisferre
Probably not a big difference to the large majority of people who are not
aware this information is public.

A useful tool to be sure, companies should just be careful how they use it.

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hayksaakian
Its very hit and miss, not something I would build a service around. In my
circle of 4 friends, it only had data on one of us.

One big flaw is that you can't provide multiple sources of data as the basis
of a search. Eg no phone AND email, only o ne at a time.

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dedabt
4 people isn't exactly statistically significant. FullContact averages a 60%
match rate to at least one social profile. Let me know if you find anything
better.

It's an API. You could run two separate calls and then merge, or run the excel
macro with two separate files and merge. We plan to have multiple queries in
the future.

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jredwards
I tried it with several hundred. The hit rate was very low. I don't recall
exactly what it was, but it was low enough that I abandoned the service.

~~~
lloyddobbler
First off, full disclosure (in case it's not obvious) - I work at FullContact.

Sorry to hear that. Out of curiosity, do you remember which response code you
were getting? If it was a 202, it indicates that we've accepted your query,
but are processing (i.e., going out and looking for the data). If you try
again in 5 minutes, you'll normally see a lot more 200's.

(Only reason I ask is we see a lot of confusion over 202's - people often
think of them as errors, instead of meaning 'ACCEPTED - PROCESSING'.)

Regardless, if you have a few thousand queries and would like to send us a
sample, we're always happy to run a match test and show you what you'd get
back (obviously, a larger sample size gives you a better idea of results at
scale).

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255martyn
At first I was skeptical about fullcontact, afraid of the big-brother like
effect. Then I met the CTO at a hackathon, and it turns out he's really
concerned about privacy and respecting opt-outs. I highly recommend the
company.

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anon6567
This sounds a lot like RapLeaf, what are the pros and cons of each service?

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dedabt
Rapleaf doesn't do social. They are great at demographics. FullContact
provides publicly available social profile URLs. Depends on what you are
looking for.

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gfodor
Rapleaf was crawling and providing information crawled from social networking
sites (much more than just links to profiles) back in 2007. They were
providing an API to access this data in 2008 or 2009 I think. They no longer
do any of this I think and have pivoted towards offline data, but don't quote
me on that.

