A cadre of top-flight DevOps practitioners will gather later this week at an undisclosed location in Northern California.

It will be considerably friendlier than Fight Club, thank goodness, but it’s nearly as mysterious. The goal: To hash out important issues they see in their own deployments, to compare notes on problems they see and to talk in a way that they feel they cannot do in vendor-driven trade shows and conferences, according to one DevOps expert who will attend the invitation-only event.

Wanted: vendor-free venue

“We want to be able to talk and share without being barraged by vendor c#$p,” he said.

DevOps pros from Twitter, Square, Webex, Facebook, Evernote, TicketMaster, RapLeaf and other big-name companies have RSVP’d yes to the event, he said.

The “DevOps” movement aims to get in-house developers and operations people to work together closely instead of at cross purposes. These two camps were traditionally at odds — developers always want the latest and greatest technology as fast as possible while operations people like slow, controlled rollouts of IT. That’s a tough difference to reconcile.

Rapleaf will be there, talking about Hadoop, for example.  In a more traditional venue, Cloudera, Hortonworks, EMC or some other Hadoop vendor would be on hand and that very presence impacts the nature of the discussion. “We don’t want that,” he said.

Sharing successes and snafus

“People who come have to share and feel comfortable in that,” he said. The goal is an open discussion where these experts  can talk about what they’re doing, what the problems they have, and ask the others what they’re seeing.

There will be a segment on cloud computing of course. “The cloud is great for certain workloads and variables. We want to talk about workloads and variables and when it makes sense given those variables for them to stand up their own hardware,” he said.

What’ll be in it for these people other than education and camaradarie? “Well, I hear the food’s going to be great,” he said.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Polina Sergeeva

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It’s all great news if you’re a big, data-heavy startup or huge company with thousands of engineers. But what does big data really mean to most businesses on the web? Anyone who runs a website knows that there’s a vast amount of information being collected — but the fact is that there are remarkably few ways to really use it. Step in Personyze, an Israeli startup that wants to help people turn all that data into a recipe for action.

The company, based in Tel Aviv, is today announcing an integration with San Francisco’s Rapleaf, a controversial company that collects and trades data from the Web. Rapleaf’s methods have come in for plenty of criticism in the past, but Personyze says the agreement between the two companies will bring new data into its systems without compromising privacy.

How does it work? Personyze originally started with an add-on to Google Analytics, but it quickly developed its own standalone analytics product. That’s because it realized it wanted to build something a little different; a suite of tools that first lets website owners analyze a vast range of data about their users — and then, crucially, gives them a way to deliver them customized pages based on whichever segments they choose to focus on.

“With this segmentation engine, you can separate visitors off depending on different variables,” founder Yakov Shabat told me. Those variables include “Geography, keywords, what site they came from, whether they’ve visited before. We can take behavioral information, we can take social information like age or number of friends from Facebook, we can take third-party integration.”

What he means is that if you have a particular group of users who have a particular requirement — say, you discover that late-night visitors from America who come via Twitter tend to want to buy specific goods — you can make sure they see the most appropriate material. And there’s no complex development required: just find the right assets to point them towards, drop a little Javascript onto your pages and it’s done. Suddenly, the next time somebody fitting the bill drops by, they’ll see something personalized to them.

It’s something Shabat admits is still new to a lot of companies. “We’re have to do a bit of market education,” he admits. “But a lot of people do understand the segments they have… they just don’t know how to define them.”

He suggests that using Personyze means users spend more time spent on your site, and that time is more enjoyable because it’s personalized. It allows site owners to serve better ads more easily, which leads to better sales and greater clickthrough rates. And to prove that this isn’t just a pile of magic beans, the company says it’s already got revenue coming in from its customers: mainly small- and medium-sized companies, but a few big ones too — e-commerce customers, gaming sites, and (says Shabat) it is also currently being evaluated by some news websites, too. The result of all of this is that the business isn’t looking for funding.

Instead, it’s striking out with deals, including its one with Rapleaf. That will put the issue of data protection under the microscope, especially since Rapleaf’s practices have been exposed on several occasions: here by Om, in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere.

Personyze says it’s avoiding those pitfalls by protecting user privacy — the data it collects from one website stays within that website alone, and is not shared across many services. But it adds that the deal will let customers pipe much more basic information into the system, allowing them to start with a much richer base of data.

Will personalization be a big business? I’m not sure, but it’s possible. It’s certainly already making great waves in ad networks, tracking and behavioral targeting — despite the privacy concerns. But if Personyze is going to unlock an entirely new world for smaller web companies, then it needs to focus on being fast, easy and user-friendly, and right now even with these tools, personalization isn’t labor-free.

However, the larger point holds true: if big data is truly going to become a big idea, then people will need ways to turn information into something they can really use… and the mainstream tools out there right now don’t necessarily do that job properly.

“I think Google Analytics is a fantastic tool,” admits Shabat. “But it doesn’t give you the way to change what happens.”

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Here is the text of their email:

Dear Etacts user,

After almost a year of providing our free service to help you manage your relationships, we’re sorry to announce that we will be shutting down the Etacts service. Effective January 31, 2011, the service will cease to operate and your user data will be deleted. We recognize and appreciate the time and energy you’ve given us in using Etacts, and we sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this will cause you.

Thank you for your support throughout our existence.

Evan and Howie
The Founders of Etacts

Update: There are reports Salesforce might have bought the company, though from the aforementioned email, it doesn’t seem like there was much to buy. Salesforce might just have hired the two co-founders to work for them, perhaps in its Jigsaw division. eTacts technology could be applied to Salesforce’s CRM products.

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Today, Wall Street Journal’s Emily Steel has written an in-depth (and excellent) expose of this company, whose tentacles are spread deep into the Internet.

RapLeaf’s privacy policy states it won’t “collect or work with sensitive data on children, health or medical conditions, sexual preferences, financial account information or religious beliefs.” After the Journal asked RapLeaf whether some of its profile segments contradicted its privacy policy, the company eliminated many of those segments. Segments eliminated include: interest in the Bible, Hispanic and Asian ethnic products, gambling, tobacco, adult entertainment, “get rich quick” offers and age and gender of children in household. RapLeaf says many of its segments are also “used widely by the direct-marketing industry today.”

Here is what The Wall Street Journal found:

• Rapleaf knows your real names and email addresses.
• It can build rich profiles by tapping voter-registration files, shopping histories, social-networking activities and more. In effect, it can built the ultimate dossier on you.
• Rapleaf sells pretty elaborate data that includes household income, age, political leaning, and even more granular details such as your interest in get-rich-quick schemes.
• According to the WSJ, Rapleaf segments people into 400 categories.
• Rapleaf says it doesn’t transmit personally identifiable data for online advertising, but the WSJ found that is not the case. Rapleaf shared a unique Facebook ID to at least 12 companies and a unique MySpace ID number to six companies. Any sharing was accidental, the company said.
• Politicians, both Democrats and Republicans, are using Rapleaf. It has provided data to 10 political campaigns

Rapleaf’s web of cookies and data-collection end points is pretty vast. Last week, I shared some of the names with you, but it is a lot larger. Add several others to that list of companies:

When a person logs in to certain sites, the sites send identifying information to RapLeaf, which looks up that person in its database of email addresses.

Then, RapLeaf installs a “cookie,” a small text file, on the person’s computer containing details about the individual (minus name and other identifiable facts). Sites where this happened include e-card provider Pingg.com, advice portal About.com and picture service TwitPic.com.

In some cases, RapLeaf also transmits data about the person to advertising companies it partners with.

“Twenty-two companies, including Google’s Invite Media, confirmed receiving data from RapLeaf,” the Journal writes.

Before I go, hats off to Emily for doing such a great and in-depth piece. Clearly, it messes up plans for my next post, but I felt it was important enough for me to share what WSJ discovered with you all.

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By accessing its database of 378,968,953 consumer email profiles, banks, retailers, and anti-fraud firms (all of which it counts among its clients) Rapleaf can quickly confirm legitimate customers and weed out scammers, cutting verification costs and improving the user experience. “Companies spend as much as $100 getting customers to their site. The goal is to filter out the bad people and keep as many good people as possible,” (Joel) Jewitt (Rapleaf’s VP of Business Development) says. “If a customer’s email address is attached to three or four social networking sites with 300 friends, the email likely isn’t fake and the retailer can put that person in the ‘good’ pile.”

One of our readers pointed out that because Rapleaf is sending data to these companies, which may be caching your information, there’s more information leaking out about you on the web. Opting out of Rapleaf’s service isn’t going to do you any good. Let’s put it bluntly: For better or worse, the genie is out of the bottle.

How Rapleaf Works

To better understand how, exactly, Rapleaf works, I did some investigating. On a basic level, Rapleaf is like a credit card company’s database. When you’re at a store and the cashier slides your credit card through, the store checks your card information against the credit card company’s database to make sure your card hasn’t expired and you have enough credit.

Rapleaf’s database contains email addresses. Say an airline offers a discount coupon, as long as you provide your email. When you sign up for the coupon, the airline looks up your email address in Rapleaf’s database; Rapleaf confirms the email is valid by checking it against your profile in its database; and the airline knows it can send you its email newsletter.

When I contacted Rapleaf, they said the company has built a database by crawling the web, looking for connections and building profiles based on their own technology. “Like Google, we crawl publicly available data on the web – as long as robots.txt allows search engines like us to crawl (we stop crawling if people disallow search engines),” CEO Auren Hoffman emailed. He added:

Rapleaf is working hard to protect consumers. We are a data company that, like 99 percent of data companies, is opt-out (rather than opt-in). But we are a white-hat data company who helps companies safely provide a more personalized experience to their customers. We try really hard to protect consumers (see) – we’ve thought a lot about consumer protection and are proud of everything we are doing. However, we are open to ideas on how we can improve and I encourage your readers to email me at auren.hoffman@rapleaf.com with ideas on how we can improve and better protect consumers. While we cannot commit to implementing any idea from your readers, we can commit that we will consider all thought-out suggestions.

The company argues what it does is no different from various ad networks, and that its policies are more consumer-friendly. You can opt out of Rapleaf by visiting this location, Hoffman said. Nevertheless, Rapleaf’s services are clearly much in demand, based on this response from CEO Hoffman:

Today we help hundreds of top retailers, hotels, advertising agencies, large brands, tech startups, educational organizations, and nonprofits personalize their customers’ experiences. (We sign NDAs with our customers so we cannot release their names.)

Think of Rapleaf as the provider of the FICO score about an email address. That email address comes with Facebook ID, Flickr ID, Twitter account information and other social details. For a marketer, or even someone trying to hit you up for business, this is pretty relevant data, for it allows them to target a customer and connect them socially. In another scenario, you can buy an email list of a million addresses for $1000, check them against Rapleaf and end up with about 10,000 emails worth targeting. That’s a pretty good deal.

A Good Email ID Is Worth Money

In order for Rapleaf to be successful, it needs to keep growing its database of good email addresses, which is why it’s giving startups like Facebook game and social CRM companies liberal access to its APIs. When a social CRM company, such as Rapportive, plugs into your Gmail account, it confirms to Rapleaf that your email address is valid. Since the social CRMs create profiles of the people who email you, the services confirm to Rapleaf that your friends’ addresses are valid, too. Technically, no data is exchanged, but the sheer quantity of look-ups is enough to beef up Rapleaf’s database.

Think of it this way: Companies like Rapportive, by making simple queries, are becoming the sources of the best and highest quality emails/IDs that Rapleaf has ever obtained. I think this is the crux of the problem. Here’s a question I sent to Rapleaf and the answer I received (emphasis mine).

Does Rapportive (and others like them, such as Gist) pay for the service? If yes, how much? What happens to the queries that originate from Rapportive? Say email x@x.com. Does that data get stored in your databases?

Unfortunately we’re not able to go into details about specific relationships because of our confidentiality agreements, but all of our customers pay us for our service.  We do have a free API (up to 1000 queries per month) that many companies use — but companies need to pay for Rapleaf for queries above that. We only allow companies to learn more about their existing customers (and we have never given out email addresses) and when they query their customers’ email, we return the most updated information Rapleaf has associated with that email. If this is a new email we have not seen before, it may be cached to provide better user experience in the future or it can be removed via opt-out.

Given that Rapleaf’s core competency is its ability to take email addresses, map them with data on the web and build a profile, I find the argument that data is cached for better user experience hard to swallow. With nearly a billion email addresses in its database, any look-up helps Rapleaf cull out the best emails from the giant morass of addresses. There are at least two companies I spoke to who have declined to work with Rapleaf and refused its offer of free data, mostly because, in their opinion, they found the workflow unsavory, to put it mildly.

Rapleaf’s Startup Web

Regardless, here is a list of Internet startups that have access to data from Rapleaf. Clearly it is incomplete, and, for some of these companies, it is not clear if they send data back to Rapleaf (I’ve noted the companies that confirmed that they only look up data). I am going to update this post with more comments as I get them.

• Rapportive. The CEO has confirmed that the company doesn’t pass any data back and forth.
• eTacts. They say they are not passing information back to Rapleaf.
• Gist. The CTO confirmed the company isn’t passing any information back to Rapleaf.
• Flowtown. Co-founder Ethan Bloch left a comment indicating Flowtown doesn’t pass any information back to Rapleaf.
• IntroMojo
• SafetyWeb
• SocialShield. Arad Rostampour denied passing any data back to Rapleaf.

As I said earlier, even if the companies aren’t passing any data, every time they do an email-based look-up against Rapleaf’s database, they are essentially helping make Rapleaf’s database more powerful.

Casting the Social Web

Verifying emails is one thing. But today, there is a lot more valid social information about demographics, interests, location, etc. available that a company like Rapleaf could use to fill out its profiles. I’m as concerned about startups using Rapleaf’s API as I am about how the company continues to mine data from huge data-rich social services such as LinkedIn. LinkedIn data is ending up on Rapleaf, and from there, it’s appearing on other services such as Flowtown. When I contacted LinkedIn, its spokesperson sent the following response:

As we’ve always said, our user data belongs to our users. It is provided by them and unless they have restricted it, is available on our site. We don’t share personally identifiable information with third parties without user consent. We also have teams that help protect our members’ professional profiles from scraping, spamming and any other activity that violates our terms of service. We don’t have any business relationship with Rapleaf.

However, LinkedIn data ends up at Rapleaf and, via Rapleaf, at other services through scraping of the publicly available data. Some people with knowledge of the subject believe that alternative tactics are being used to get around the API limitations of services such as LinkedIn. (If you know more, please get in touch with me.)

To be clear, I don’t have old-fashioned notions about privacy on the Internet. I know the realities of today’s Internet life. In order to enjoy the convenience of using web-based services, one has to make some sacrifices, and living socially online will eventually lead to an erosion of privacy. However, what I find egregious is how the information is surreptitiously collected all over the web, then aggregated to be sold, without us having any control or ability to look into that data. Sure we can opt out, but only if we know that we’re being profiled. (Ironically, you have to register to opt-out.)

I don’t want to blame only Rapleaf — ad networks are doing this as well, giving it cutesy names like behavioral targeting. U.S. Reps. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and Joe Barton (R-Texas)  recently sent a letter to Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, questioning him about privacy breaches at the social network. In August 2010, these same congressmen asked for information from various web services on cookies and how they use them. Maybe they should consider looking at these data-collectors as well. Perhaps they will come to the conclusion that this industry needs some kind of oversight.

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The latest privacy-related dust-up at Facebook, sparked by a WSJ story, might be making Facebook the target of the consumer ire, but in my opinion, the real story centers around San Francisco-based Internet information aggregation company called Rapleaf. In their story, Emily Steel and Geoffrey Fowler of WSJ write:

In this case, however, the Journal found that one data-gathering firm, RapLeaf Inc., had linked Facebook user ID information obtained from apps to its own database of Internet users, which it sells. RapLeaf also transmitted the Facebook IDs it obtained to a dozen other firms, the Journal found. RapLeaf said that transmission was unintentional. “We didn’t do it on purpose,” said Joel Jewitt, vice president of business development for RapLeaf. Facebook said it previously has “taken steps … to significantly limit Rapleaf’s ability to use any Facebook-related data.” The most expansive use of Facebook user information uncovered by the Journal involved RapLeaf. The San Francisco company compiles and sells profiles of individuals based in part on their online activities.

The funny part is that Rapleaf, doesn’t need any of the user ID stuff. All it needs is an email and it can build a profile of you that is scary, to say the least.

If you want to understand what Rapleaf does, I suggest you visit the website of a San Francisco-based startup, Flowtown, which specializes in helping companies craft social media marketing messages. Enter anyone’s email address, and you will see information pop up about him or her, including links to their social networks and even some of their most recent postings. Flowtown gets most of its information from Rapleaf (along with a handful of other sources), which in turn gets its information from Facebook apps and other sources.

Rapleaf’s influence on the web is only increasing. Take for instance startups such as Rapportive, which makes an extension that plugs into your Google mail account and gives you access to profile data of the person you are exchanging emails with. The data for the service is coming from Rapleaf. Rapportive competitor eTacts also pulls data from Rapleaf. And so does Gist. It is not clear if these startups share any data back with Rapleaf, but I would think there has to be some quid pro quo.

“In contrast to other startups in our space who have entered into data-sharing agreements with Rapleaf in exchange for free data, we explicitly ensured that we would not have to share any data back to Rapleaf (for the good of our users),” Howard Liu, co-founder of eTacts emailed us in response to a query. Rapleaf Rapportive CEO Rahul Vohra also confirmed in our comment section that his service doesn’t pass any data back to Rapleaf.  And so did Gist CEO. (We will be talking to Rapleaf executive tomorrow morning and are going to get an update from some of the other startups as well.)

Think of it this way: If data is the currency of the web, then Rapleaf is controlling a lot of it.Rapleaf knows a lot more about you, your social connections and what you do — more than you realize.

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1) Territorialize but don’t Monopolize the limited resource at the
event — the fairer sex. Tease, but do not “hotbox.”

2) Be a Vacation. (I’ve used this one before, but it’s worth repeating.) Humor and a snipett of self deprecating humor go a long way in building charm. Don’t just be a pleasure to work with, be their vacation. I attended a comedy showcase Rapleaf CEO Auren Hoffman, did and it helps him be a vacation for people when he uses humor.

3) Rebrand Yourself. I’d get nowhere in life if I were Lawrence. But goofy friendly ‘Larry’ is approachable. Larry-licous is over the top but Fergilicious is, cha-chiang!, cash money.

4) Never ask point-blank Yes/No pre-qual questions. It shows a lack of profiling ability. Don’ts: “So are you a member?” or “Did you study at HBS?”
Dos: “Have I seen you @ similar industry events” or “Did you go to school in the boston area?”

5) DDSS. The “DD” stands for “dumb it down.” “SS” is “sandbagging for success.” Sandbag your elevator pitch and sell. Again, incorporate humor. My rule of thumb is that I want to make the message on what I do easy enough for a multi-tasking, C-level ‘hitter’ to recite it back to me, even after he’s had 6 vodka tonics. If you can’t do this, your message stinks.

6) No broken branch friends. Some people you know won’t or can’t introduce you. A broken branch is a person who doesn’t introduce you (ever). I stole this from my side project, theDatingReport.com where some relationships get in a year and you still don’t know who their friends are.

7) Be a Weed. Weeds grow and foster entire impromptu communities. Friendship with you is like a gateway drug. Be the one that gets added via Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Orkut, Friendster, MySpace, Ryze. (I say MySpace twice cuz its the biggest.)

8) Work the Room’s Fringes. a) Wallflowers can be broken branches but could be an “amiable ambush”- another dude looking to charm you.

9) Anoint an Alpha Male. Better than being one, pick out a gamma male, a rising star, and make him alpha. Defer to him when the pack is trying to choose, listen when he’s on a soapbox, let him have first pick and make positive fun of his sandbagging whenever possible.

10) Run the Point. Point guards don’t score (plus who wants to score
in a room full of dudes). Good point guards pass, meaning they set aside
their own agenda (shy, sausage-ing, turtling) and make intros.

11) Invite People to a Post Party. Do the math. The event goes from 7pm to 9pm and they had passed apps. Translation: People are still hungry. Get your host, the VIPs and or your crew to a nearby eatery. Key tip: hosts and organizer won’t eat until 30-40 min after event ends. Or be a Larry Chiang and order Chicago Deep Dish from Patxi’s and just hand it out to keep the night going.

12) Encourage fake thinking. Get a person to think they’re thinking and they love you. Get them to really think and they’ll hate you.
* BONUS MAN CHARM TIP
13) Pin-The-Tail-on-the-Donkey. Nothing rallies a crew of men better than an alpha of the night who IDs a donkey. A donkey is party dufus that is borderline malicious. For example, at last fall’s TechCrunch 40, a VC said to me after I ddss duck9, “How dumb, that will never work”. I pointed three fingers up in the air (entrepreneur gang symbol/ signal) and emoted daggers toward ‘donkey’. Fast forward 20 minutes and there’s a full business card stomp, circle
dance. It was native. Next week I post a Yelp review of said donkey’s VC firm and buy $3,000 of inbound links. Sha-zam! Google search result #3 for firm name is my yelp poke in the eye. Donkey-ify for fun and community building.

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