Re: About.me Raplet, bouncing from list

[Martin Kleppmann]

Posting to the list on behalf of Jed Wood (seems like Google Groups is
really buggy at the moment — I've had several issues with it in the
last few days!), reply below:

On 8 March 2011 20:54, Jed Wood <j...@limechile.com> wrote:
> Martin-
> I just tried twice to send the following message to the group, but got a
> notice saying it couldn't be posted. Not sure what's up with that, though I
> guess it's ultimately directed at you anyway:
> ===
> Ah man, I thought I was so clever for putting an About.me raplet together,
> doing some hackish scraping to search for the person and compile the
> relevant bits of info. But I just noticed that it already exists! However, I
> have only seen it on one of my contacts (at least that I know of), and it
> doesn't show for several of my contacts that I know have About.me pages.
> So two questions, out of curiosity:
> 1- Can you (Martin) share any behind-the-scenes info on how this particular
> raplet is currently working? How are you determining if you've found a
> match?
> 2- In my version I'd be displaying the headline, bio and links. I'm assuming
> you could easily have your raplet do the same. Was it for the sake of
> avoiding information overload that you choose not to display any details?
> Thanks,
> -Jed

Hi Jed,

I'm not aware of an About.me raplet. I suspect that the About.me link
you saw on a profile was added manually by the owner of the profile.
(If you privately send me the email address of your contact, I can
check where the information came from.) If the user has added a link,
we don't currently fetch any more information from that website
(except for Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn links), which is why we
can't currently show headline/bio/links from about.me.

A Raplet for About.me sounds like a good idea, but as you say, the
challenge is in identifying which profile belongs to which person.
Matching by name is a possibility — the CrunchBase raplet does that,
for example — but it's quite unreliable.

Cheers
Martin

--
Martin Kleppmann
Co-founder, Rapportive
http://rapportive.com

[Jed Wood]

Martin and group:

On Wed, Mar 9, 2011 at 5:53 PM, Martin Kleppmann <mar...@rapportive.com> wrote:

I'm not aware of an About.me raplet. I suspect that the About.me link
you saw on a profile was added manually by the owner of the profile.

Ah, should have thought of that. Thanks Martin. 

A Raplet for About.me sounds like a good idea, but as you say, the
challenge is in identifying which profile belongs to which person.

Re: the accuracy/reliability, here's my initial plan. I'd love any feedback or additional ideas from the group:

- If we find just one exact name match, I'll display the profile.

- If we find more than one exact name match, I'll show a small headline and About.me username for the first 3, which will link out to the pages. 

- If we don't find any exact matches, nothing will be displayed.

 

Thanks,

-Jed