Looking for a Facebook Demographic Tool

I would like to have a tool built which has the ability to crawl public profiles based on location and filter down with specific search criteria.

Example:

Target = 18-25yr Male, with keyword Soccer in fb profile, in <city here>

Result = List of males in the age range within the specific city who have soccer listed as an interest.

Facebook keeps changing their API, so any program may not last long without modification, but here is an example of what we used as a basis for getting profile information via an application:


It is hard to scrape Facebook using normal methods like following links on the web, but if you can get users to use an FB application, then you can get their demographic data using the above method.

If anyone has somehow developed a demographic scraper that can work by itself, I'd also be interested.

This is not 100% what you are looking for, but I've created a Wordpress plug-in that uses a FB account to look up the birthday and gender of your commentators.

It's called "Blog Demographics" (search in the plug-ins directory of Wordpress for it). You might wanna take a look at the source-code if you are interested in how this is done.

There's also the graph-api available which offers some data without permission, but not the birthday for example.

The key is to use the mobile version of FB to get rid of the annoying JavaScript stuff so you can easier scrape the content.

Since I've released the first version, FB already changed it's layout once, so it's true that a scraper will not work long without modification.

damn layout changes lol. Yeah so what your referring to with regard to an app is kinda along the lines of the 'Advanced Search 2.0' app on FB?

I wasn't able to get a look at an example of the demo tool bc after logging into fb via that url and allowing the app, it produced some invalid argument errors. It sounds like this is really close to what I'm talking about though. When layouts are changed with facebook, is that something that's very difficult to modify a program to adjust for? Are there ways to design a program that can be modified on the front end so that it operates differently in the back when certain changes are made? Ie if a program is built to check URL A but it's changed by FB to URL B, a settings menu or something could be modified to account for the changes.

S1R1US said:

damn layout changes lol. Yeah so what your referring to with regard to an app is kinda along the lines of the 'Advanced Search 2.0' app on FB?

Click to expand...

Exactly. We wrote an application that also interrogates FB demographic data when people use it. You have to be very careful about how you then use this data, but if you are thoughtful and stealthy, you can make good bankable use of it. Read carefully the Facebook TOS, and if you decide to go around it, do it in a way that you won't be caught immediately. You might also want to read about what has and hasn't changed about Farmville advertising in the last year or so on FB. It illustrates some of the problems, and also how if you don't run a zero sum game with FB (meaning they get some money out of it, too) you may be able to get away with more than you think. Also, I don't think violating the TOS is strictly necessary, but one could make money faster if you went around it.