
Octazen: What The Heck Did Facebook Just Buy Exactly, And Why? - vaksel
http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/19/octazen-what-the-heck-did-facebook-just-buy-exactly-and-why/
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s3graham
Given the cloak-and-dagger and "redeployment" line, my guess would be that
Octazen is going to be part of an anti-scraping team at Facebook to avoid
Facebook getting "Octazen'd" as much as possible.

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andreyf
Hah, that, or they just scraped a ton of fb data and threatned to start
selling it.

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jfarmer
Rapleaf already does that...

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transmit101
I perma-deleted my Facebook account last week.

Whatever the motivation of this acquisition, Facebook simply doesn't appear to
do enough to look after my privacy, especially given the personal and
sometimes sensitive nature of the data they are handling.

The notion that they want to expand into online payments and banking is
laughable without a dramatic rethink of their approach to data.

For a company which built their reputation on protecting their users' privacy
to follow the path it has is tantamount to business suicide.

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ohashi
You think facebook actually deleted your information?

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Groxx
When you cancel the account, they just mark it as cancelled. Your login still
works, and if you _do_ log back in, it reactivates everything.

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sern
There's also a perma-delete a couple of levels deep in the help system that
will deactivate your account forever. (Like deactivation, it probably doesn't
delete anything, though.)

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metamemetics
I once set my facebook email as a super old hotmail address all the way back
from high school. I wanted all the notification spam sent to an email I would
never check. I later get a "suggestion" to friend a very random person with a
vaguely familiar name who I have 0 mutual friends with.

The name was an alumini of a college I didn't go to, who I once emailed to
setup an admissions interview with.

Facebook clearly has already been scraping email headers (or at least had an
agreement with microsoft to do so).

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bhousel
More likely, _that_ person just kept _your_ old email around around in their
address book, and then mass imported it into facebook when they joined.

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jfarmer
Yes, I can confirm Facebook does this. When you import your email address
book, Facebook stores it forever.

I don't know if they keep your credentials around, too, and periodically
refresh their data. That'd be doubly invasive, but it wouldn't surprise me. :)

~~~
metamemetics
that would make sense. because the timing happened when I switched it to the
ancient hotmail address, it could have his imported data still stored and
rechecked to find my old email where it hadnt before.

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maxklein
Facebook only supported 3 or 4 import formats, but Octazen supports at least
21 different services. Maybe they wanted the technology as well as the people
who know how to use the technology? Likely cheaper and faster than getting 3
to 4 engineers on the task and then waiting 6 months.

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jfarmer
I doubt Facebook cares about importing address book from N additional email
services -- they're growing at a rate of like 300-500k new users per day, and
accelerating.

So it seems unlikely that was the driving rationale behind the acquisition.

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lexx12
Just to point others, facebook is preparing for Project Titan.
[http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/05/facebooks-project-titan-
a-f...](http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/05/facebooks-project-titan-a-full-
featured-webmail-product/)

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aresant
Octazen is (was?) essentially a Facebook Connect competitor and since they
were acquired several of their core services have been disconnected.

This reads to me as a strategy about whittling the market to one option,
Facebook's, and not much else.

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coryl
I don't think thats it, Octazen wasn't really a facebook connect competitor at
all. They sold scraping scripts that let you login and grab data.

[http://web.archive.org/web/20080619054335/http://www.octazen...](http://web.archive.org/web/20080619054335/http://www.octazen.com/)

~~~
jfarmer
The technical specs are significantly different, but they solve a large,
overlapping set of distribution problems.

If you want to build a viral app/game/whatever you have to pick your platform.
Traditionally, if you did it on the web, you'd use something like Octazen to
download address books and send invites.

That's how almost every non-FB viral startup bootstrapped itself, including
Facebook!

So Facebook just made it a LOT harder to build something viral without using
Platform or Connect.

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timcederman
I've used Octazen's products in the past, and they make some solid libraries
that are easy to incorporate, particular for things like address importation.

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statictype
Does their software violate terms of services for the services they scrape? I
don't particular care if they do, just that it would seem like a really
sketchy acquisition for a company like Facebook which already drawn privacy-
related criticism

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chris123
It would be interesting to see a review and comparison of contact importer
services, nothing the white hats, black hats, and gray hats.

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indigoviolet
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occams_razor>

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grahamr
Can anyone suggest an alternative high-quality contact importer?

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pclark
<http://www.improsys.com> <http://www.cloudsponge.com>
<http://openinviter.com>

