Find Your Whole Social Graph on Facebook at Once With FBFriendFinder
We've just found a new application for finding your Twitter followers, LinkedIn connections and other friends from around the web on Facebook - all at once and all quite simply.
This tool is called FBFriendFinder. It comes from the Dutch web dev shop Open & Sociaal, and it works like a charm by using OAuth, Facebook Connect and contact export functions to gather enough data to organize a user's social graph. The most interesting part, however, isn't the technology but the business model. You have to read it to believe it.
First, FBFriendFinder makes the friend-finding part of the process as user-friendly as possible, eliminating clicks and needless navigation whenever possible:
FBFriendFinder has take the much maligned approach of actually requiring users to pay for the service. Users are charged around one American penny per friend found, give or take. The site integrates with PayPal, so the process is quick and painless.
After we paid our fee, we were able to scroll through a slideshow of our social graph (albeit with a lot of same-name duplicate accounts) to find and add those friends to our Facebook network. This process was a tiny bit buggy and required some back-and-forth navigation (it seems our friends at The Next Web had the same problem), but overall, the experience was well worth the five bucks it took to find these friends without having to manually hunt them down ourselves or rely on Facebook suggestions.
Also, we appreciate the app's acknowledgement of our "crazy lifestyle." And now, we're off to ditch these pajama pants we've been sporting since the weekend and just go bananas. It's our crazy lifestyle calling to us - the crazy lifestyle we never knew we had.
A sincere congratulations to the FBFriendFinder dude for creating a handy and monetizable application.
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Thanks for posting this... I was really excited about it until I saw it takes money to make it work...
I'd be using it and promoting it to friends right now, but instead I'm just explaining why the cost makes it not worth my time.
But I'm very much on the lookout for a service like this. I'd love to build a Facebook page specific to all of my 2,000 twitter follows.
Of course if this is the only solution for that maybe I will have to pay? For now at least I'm still searching for something better!
Peace
Why is this described by Websense as "potentially damaging"?
You might want to censor out a couple more names in that last screenshot. :)
they don't have the answer Davor, may be because they can start scamming with socializing.
Thanks for the review! I’ll use your input to enhance the service. I’ll focus on communicating some stuff a bit clearer.
Furthermore I am curious what other networks people want to see being added?
Suggestion for Bebo, Orkut, Google Contacts have been noted down already and are in the pipeline.
Looking forward to your input!
@RWW thanks for the lovely review. Please note that comment no. 5 is actually comment spam, it is my comment from The Next Web blog but pasted by somebody I don't know and is not me.
@Davor, @Lyanna: As I mention on the FbFriendFinder site: We don't store any userdata, besides ID's from people who pay, for recurring logins. We don't mail people, even have mail, we cannot auto-friend people, we don't store any friend data. It is only used for looking up your potential friends on Facebook.
@Deane I have limitted the app to only retrieved your 300 most recently added Twitter friends. I have put limitters on all contacts retrieved, because it would take to long to find em all on Facebook anyhow and in my view you want to use the service to find some of those friends you wanted to add all along, not find and add thousands and thousands of people.
Furthermore @Deane, this service is kinda free if you see it just as giving a beer to me to thank me :D.
I also have set a maximum price as you might notice in the screenshot in this article. You pay a-cent-per-friend for the first 500 people to lookup. So $5.35 is the maximum price, also if you want to look up e.g. 1433 people.
greetings from Amsterdam,
@roelandp
Good one.. Thanks for this info..
@ Roeland You might want to get in touch with Websense, mate.
Very good article Jolie
Something that I came across recently that you may be intersted in is this website (www.theisbook.com) that generates your Facebook Status for you when you're not feeling very creative:
http://www.theisbook.com/status-generator/
Check it out and thank me later
Keep up the good work, I look forward to reading more of your stuff.
Thanks for posting Justin! And, love your Facebook Connect integration. Here’s to a more social web.