While at a summer barbecue with her brother and his friends, Joyce Kim checked her e-mail and saw an unfamiliar name.
The e-mail was from a guy she’d supposedly met at a party who now wanted to take her out on a date. The only problem was, she didn’t remember ever meeting him.
She read the e-mail aloud to her brother Jared and his entourage — all “tech geeks? who had toted their laptops to the party. The group immediately turned to their keyboards to do a little cyber stalking and within a few days, Jared Kim was running a company designed to do just that.
His experience is both an example and a cautionary tale for a new generation of code writers, programmers and Web developers who are increasingly using social networking sites as platforms to launch their own businesses.
This new “cottage industry? has become so prominent that even Facebook — a popular college social networking site — agreed in May to partner with some of these so-called “third-party? businesses. The deal will allow select companies to run their programs off Facebook’s platform and generate ad revenue.
Working with his friends to Goggle, check Friendster and search MySpace for any information they could find on the prospective date, Kim had a thought: Why not write a program that searches all the social networking sites at once and creates a profile of the person you’re searching for?
A lot of people spend hours browsing sites to stalk friends, ex-girlfriends and love interests online “but there isn’t a streamlined process that’s, like, one shot, boom,? said the now 19-year-old freshman at University of California, Berkeley.
Many of these sites are funded with click-through ads that can make the owner anywhere from $1 to $10 for every 1,000 page views. Since many of these sites get thousands — or even hundreds of thousands — of page views, the money can add up.
Photo by MSDesigns.
No comments yet.