We’ve just found a new application for finding your Twitter followers, LinkedIn connections and other friends from around the web on Facebook – all at once and all quite simply.
This tool is called FBFriendFinder. It comes from the Dutch web dev shop Open & Sociaal, and it works like a charm by using OAuth, Facebook Connect and contact export functions to gather enough data to organize a user’s social graph. The most interesting part, however, isn’t the technology but the business model. You have to read it to believe it.
First, FBFriendFinder makes the friend-finding part of the process as user-friendly as possible, eliminating clicks and needless navigation whenever possible:
FBFriendFinder has take the much maligned approach of actually requiring users to pay for the service. Users are charged around one American penny per friend found, give or take. The site integrates with PayPal, so the process is quick and painless.
After we paid our fee, we were able to scroll through a slideshow of our social graph (albeit with a lot of same-name duplicate accounts) to find and add those friends to our Facebook network. This process was a tiny bit buggy and required some back-and-forth navigation (it seems our friends at The Next Web had the same problem), but overall, the experience was well worth the five bucks it took to find these friends without having to manually hunt them down ourselves or rely on Facebook suggestions.
Also, we appreciate the app’s acknowledgement of our “crazy lifestyle.” And now, we’re off to ditch these pajama pants we’ve been sporting since the weekend and just go bananas. It’s our crazy lifestyle calling to us – the crazy lifestyle we never knew we had.
A sincere congratulations to the FBFriendFinder dude for creating a handy and monetizable application.
