FullContact API gives marketing superpowers to growth hackers

http://blog.maptia.com/fullcontact-marketing-superpower/

by jonnym1ller • 14 years ago

40 12 14 years ago

blog.maptia.com

TamDenholm2• 14 years ago

Wasnt this the same thing someone was blogging about a few days ago and refused to use it because of the creepy way it tracked everyone?

apinstein• 14 years ago

No. Full Contact cross-references an email address to publicly available information. Full Contact basically just automates a legitimate public search on information shared with intent between a user and a site owner.

The things that caused fury (and rightly so) the other day were a handful of tracking systems that use a single cookie across multiple sites (some with contact info) to break anonymity for the any site in the network. So the user think they're anonymous, but they are in fact personally identifiable to the site owner.

BIG difference.

TamDenholm2• 14 years ago

I see, thanks for the correction.

lucisferre• 14 years ago

Probably not a big difference to the large majority of people who are not aware this information is public.

A useful tool to be sure, companies should just be careful how they use it.

anon6567• 14 years ago

This sounds a lot like RapLeaf, what are the pros and cons of each service?

dedabt2• 14 years ago

Rapleaf doesn't do social. They are great at demographics. FullContact provides publicly available social profile URLs. Depends on what you are looking for.

gfodor• 14 years ago

Rapleaf was crawling and providing information crawled from social networking sites (much more than just links to profiles) back in 2007. They were providing an API to access this data in 2008 or 2009 I think. They no longer do any of this I think and have pivoted towards offline data, but don't quote me on that.

hayksaakian• 14 years ago

Its very hit and miss, not something I would build a service around. In my circle of 4 friends, it only had data on one of us.

One big flaw is that you can't provide multiple sources of data as the basis of a search. Eg no phone AND email, only o ne at a time.

dedabt2• 14 years ago

4 people isn't exactly statistically significant. FullContact averages a 60% match rate to at least one social profile. Let me know if you find anything better.

It's an API. You could run two separate calls and then merge, or run the excel macro with two separate files and merge. We plan to have multiple queries in the future.

jredwards• 14 years ago

I tried it with several hundred. The hit rate was very low. I don't recall exactly what it was, but it was low enough that I abandoned the service.

255martyn• 14 years ago

At first I was skeptical about fullcontact, afraid of the big-brother like effect. Then I met the CTO at a hackathon, and it turns out he's really concerned about privacy and respecting opt-outs. I highly recommend the company.

FullContact API gives marketing superpowers to growth hackers

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