Facebook acquires contact-importing company Octazen

by Jay Hathaway on February 21, 2010 at 02:04 PM

Facebook just acquired something called Octazen Solutions, a company that most people (myself included) had never heard of until yesterday. Even Techcrunch's Mike Arrington had to ask "What did Facebook just buy?" Arrington and others talked to their industry sources, and the word around the web is that Octazen is an incredibly successful data-scraping operation, grabbing users' social graphs from one service and porting them to another.

Octazen could certainly use their methods of avoiding the usual restrictions on scraping (stuff like API rate limits) for sketchy purposes, like selling users' data, but Facebook might have more benign intentions for its new acquisition. See, Facebook wants as many users with as many friends as possible -- it's good for business! -- and it's easier to find your Facebook friends by connecting with some sites than others.

You can already find new Facebook buddies via major services like AIM and Gmail, but Octazen could use its mad scraping skills to make it possible for Facebook to determine user relationships on other social networks and email services around the web. We obviously have to wait and see what happens, but I suspect this move has to do with Facebook's push for users to consolidate their web presence around Facebook.

[via GigaOM, via TechCrunch]

Tags: facebook, octazen, scraping, social graphs, SocialGraphs, SocialNetworking, user data, UserData