

Show HN: Invitation Engine for Facebook Apps - deepkut
http://graphmuse.com
We spent a lot of time working on this, including the demo, and we'd love some feedback.<p>It might take a little bit of time to load if lots of people are trying the demo, so please try to be patient. We spent a lot of time to ensure you'll be impressed.<p>Feel free to email us at tony or chuck @graphmuse.com if you'd like to discuss further!
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patrickambron
I personally just don't like app invites. I don't use them, and I literally
never pay attention to ones I get.

That said, the clusters are really impressive. All of my clusters were
basically just groups of people from different times/events of my life
(highschool people/friends, college friends, colleagues, people I knew when I
lived in Syracuse, etc). It's an obvious way to separate my groups of
networks, and it was fast. That's useful in so many contexts

~~~
deepkut
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).

~~~
patrickambron
That would definitely be interesting from a startup founder's perspective.

From a purely consumer standpoint, I would use something like this to create
my FB lists, if you made that easy. It's also useful when planning events. So,
while I would personally never use it to send an app invite, I would use this
if I was planning a party, and wanted to quickly see who I should invite and
message, etc

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deepkut
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?

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habosa
Hi Tony.

I just demoed the app and it's awesome, it basically identified all of my
friends into perfect groups, with only a little confusion. Obvious groups like
"people I met when I spent a summer at Brown" were 100% accurate and blew me
away. High school and college also got their own clearly defined groups. Way
to go, I hope other people are as interested as I am.

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spydertennis
Worked exactly the same for me. Blown away thinking about all the cool ways to
leverage this.

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

tony@graphmuse.com

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...](http://www.thedp.com/article/2012/02/new__directory_launched_for_campus_greeks)

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far33d
It's not clear to me that the main hypothesis of this engine is correct -
namely, that request recipients who are closely clustered to other users are
more likely to accept the request. Do you have data that supports this
hypothesis?

That said - request recipient optimization works, and offering it as a service
could be a successful business. I think your primary value proposition (higher
CTR's on lower volume) is solid, but would like to see verification that your
approach (using clustering) is valid for that use case.

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deepkut
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.

~~~
far33d
Makes sense. In the context of auto-identifying social networks, this is very
valuable - I could see glassdoor/identified/branchout finding value in this as
well.

~~~
deepkut
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?

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engtech
Wow. You built 10 clusters, and I could have clearly given a name to each
cluster.

As part of your demo, you should let me build a list based on each cluster.

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deepkut
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?

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cargo8
You should definitely do this.

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deepkut
Ok, we will :)

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verganileonardo
I tried the demo and received this message:

Uncaught Error. {"errorCode": 6, "errorStr": "Internal operation failure,
unable to reticulate splines!"}

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deepkut
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.

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verganileonardo
My bad... I don't have any friends in this Facebook account.

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

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patja
How will this be monetized? I can't imagine it being free in perpetuity if it
catches on.

What about security? Passing Facebook user access tokens over http opens them
up to being sniffed on the wire, which would allow anyone to impersonate a
user of your app. Maybe ssl is supported, but all of the api documentation
examples use http.

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deepkut
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.

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KingOfB
Another method of productizing the technology could be an automatic group
generator. I'd pay 5$ to have all my friends merged into mutual groups. I have
500 friends and there's no way I'm going to create groups for all of them. But
having them grouped would be nice.

~~~
deepkut
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?

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dwynings
Yeah, I don't think many people would pay for something like that.

Katango basically provided that service for free, but they got acquired by
Google. [http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/10/google-acquires-katango-
the...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/10/google-acquires-katango-the-
automatic-friend-sorter/)

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mikebo
Can you give more info on how you are clustering friends? AFAIK Facebook
doesn't allow you to fetch friends of friends, so curious how you're finding
overlapping connections.

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deepkut
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.

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mikebo
Makes sense, thanks! Didn't realize they provided mutual friends.

Great service, did a great job on my list of friends. I would love to use
this, but having to send over user access tokens is a little scary, even over
HTTPS. Have you guys considered licensing this? Would be cool as a heroku
plugin...

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deepkut
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.

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caser
I could see this as a better way to organize my news feed. Facebook is trying
to do this a bit with "Groups @ xxxx", but this has grouped people better than
that.

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deepkut
How might we incorporate GraphMuse into the news feed?

I don't quite follow.

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chuinard
Nice work using arbor.js. I've been trying to get a grasp myself on how to use
it. What do you think about the ease of using the framework?

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deepkut
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.

