Brad Feld

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Fun With Friends

Aug 18, 2007
Category Technology

After waking up from a nap dreaming about Social Graphs (ok – not really) I realized I’d never tried to integrate my Outlook contacts into “the other stuff I use on the web.”

I figured I’d start with Facebook since it’s all the rage these days.  I have 423 friends on Facebook.  I’ve been pretty careful about only accepting folks that I know (although the “Facebook friend spam” has definitely increased in the past few weeks.) 

I ran the Outlook Contacts uploaded (export your contacts to a .CSV, upload into Facebook – hmmm – smells like an opportunity.)  Facebook found 325 contacts of mine that also had Facebook accounts (via the email address.)  I then sent out automatic friend messages to all of them (although Facebook wouldn’t let me customize the message.) 

Facebook then told me that I had 3733 contacts that weren’t in Facebook and did I want to invite them in.  I declined since my 3733 contacts that aren’t used to Facebook spam don’t need it.

While there doesn’t seem to be a great way to monitor who has joined as a result of a particular invite, I just checked my recently added friends list and have four that have already accepted my request (in the eight minutes that it took me to type this post.)

Fascinating.  Plaxo is up next.

Tags: facebook, social+graph