Last year I went to see Timaru's premier of the The Social Network at Movie Max 5. Leaving the theatre I was left inspired by what a small group of effectively college drop-outs had managed to achieve. As portrayed in the movie, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg first raised to notoriety when he created a created a web site which let users compare the "hotness" of Harvard University students.
Of course, due to privacy issues and copyright laws his initial venture was fundamentally flawed. But it did get him thinking about the phenomenal potential for social databases and the rest is history..
Inspired by Zuckerberg's feats, that night I set about building a simple tool to download all of the profiles on New Zealand's premier dating site: NZ Dating. I crawled the site over a couple of nights back in November and put the following analysis together. More...