March 28, 2008

Complete Bigsight Directory

dan birdwhistell on March 28, 2008 at 05:02 PM | | TrackBack (0)

March 18, 2008

Testing out Migration Map Embeds

dan birdwhistell on March 18, 2008 at 12:13 AM | | TrackBack (0)

February 11, 2008

Bigsight Widget from Crunchbase

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Mark Hendrickson did a bang up job in launching this.

dan birdwhistell on February 11, 2008 at 02:50 PM | | TrackBack (0)

January 09, 2008

Bigsight covered on Techcrunch; Nice User Growth

Mark Hendrickson covered us on Techcrunch yesterday with this great write-up.  We really got lucky in that he put in some really great research and took the time to pose the tough questions about the space we're in, how we shape up against the big boys, and the limits to our existing model.  While the story got buried a bit overnight, we still saw a solid traffic bump and acquired about 250 new users, which is substantial given that we're just now pushing the site out and were working with an initial pool of under 1,000.

Ben and I have some major feature upgrades to roll out over the next week or so, and then from there, it's getting the word out.  Next stop 10,000 users.

Dan Birdwhistell on January 09, 2008 at 08:55 PM | | TrackBack (0)

January 07, 2008

Porting Data from Facebook: It's Easy

It's been quite interesting for me to observe the seemingly constant debate surrounding Facebook and what people assume to be their walled garden of user data.  Ben and I have known since mid-October, when we launched FriendCSV (an app that exports friend data) that the fb Platform was designed to give developers (and therefore users) huge amounts of control over not only their data, but the data on their friends' pages as well.  The recent flap over Robert Scoble and Plaxo using OCR to scrap e-mail addresses has re-ignited this debate and at the same time brought forth a great deal of misinformation. 

The truth is that the Platform gives developers/users everything they need to port data from fb to other networks.  All developers must do is design an application that calls for the right data and then matches it up with the appropriate data fields in his/her network.  Over the past few weeks we've been doing the proof of concept for this with bigsight, and we have it working both as pushes and pulls from fb:

  • Pushing Data from Facebook:  In our case, we have tacked on a "porter" to both our FriendCSV and Data Backup applications.  This exports relevant data and sends it to the user, but at the same time uses pieces of those data to create a basic account on bigsight.  So a few minutes after they receive their data, they also receive an e-mail welcome to bigsight which links to their profile, provides their log-in information, and also gives them a direct link to fully remove themselves (and their data) from bigsight.  The key to making this work is the user's e-mail address.  Companies interested in porting data in this way should also be aware that they could use any number of applications to do this, and they need not be complicated:  one could easily simply have a "Sign up for X network" app.
  • Pulling Data from Facebook:  Data portability isn't really that interesting unless it can flow both ways, so we wanted to make sure that we could pull just as easily as we could push.  The proof of concept is here -- http://fb.bigsight.org -- which asks users to log in to their fb account and provide a few additional bits of data before pulling out their fb information to construct a full profile on bigsight.  This could also be done more simply by bypassing the user-input fields and simply sucking out the fb data to make a basic account/profile.

For us, this has been a pretty interesting exercise in understanding the value of reading the fine details of the Platform documentation and ToS.  There were about 50 pages of very rough text to parse through, but it seems as though few developers (or companies) really jumped in there to figure out the extent to which fb was opening itself up. 

Implications:  We hope that our proof of concept here will lead people to (frankly) calm the hell down with regards to Facebook being a walled garden.  It's far from it, and companies should take some time to build applications that allow users to easily share data between networks. 

Until then, hey, why not test it out by creating a bigsight profile, either by pulling or pushing. 

Dan Birdwhistell on January 07, 2008 at 06:07 PM | | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

January 06, 2008

Launching fb Backup Application

Earlier tonight we launched our fourth fb application, Backuper.  It allows users to do a full-scale backup of their fb data.  This includes photos, personal data, and friend data (which comes out as a csv).  This is a logical extension of our original FriendCSV application that we launched in October.

Dan Birdwhistell on January 06, 2008 at 07:16 PM | | TrackBack (0)

January 01, 2008

Goal: Build the Web's People Directory

While we've been working on bigsight for over a year now, it is only recently that we've picked a final strategy, building the world's largest people directory.  The company started with an idea of building a targeted job board for the 24-31 y/o knowledge worker set.  It took only a few months for us to realize that the magic would be in first building a public directory of those individuals.  We thus went through a few iterations through Spring of '07 until, at the start of the summer, I decided that I wanted to do this full time.  We closed an angel round at the start of September and I brought Ben Sinclair on full time.  Our strategy shifted multiple times until we finally realized that we should just go as big as possible with this idea of a public directory that contains accurate and timely information about people's learning, interests, and work.

Dan Birdwhistell on January 01, 2008 at 07:11 PM | | TrackBack (0)