So 171 million FaceBook names and profiles have been captured and put into a text file. You need BitTorrent to download the files. Let me tell you. The files are huge. I spent a number of hours downloading the torrent.The text file with the URLs of all the profiles grabbed was so huge I could not open it up. I downloaded a few programs to see if they could open up such a massive file (10Gig). The only one I found that worked was called UltraEdit. This program costs $60 for the full version. Strangely enough there was a cracked copy of UltraEdit available as a torrent. I used the 30-day trial version to spy on the FaceBook profiles.
My next idea is to stuff all these URLs into an Oracle database. Then I will run a program that browses the profiles to see what nice info I can grab. The profiles sometimes show the user's FaceBook friends. That might provide even more profiles. A brute force crawl of the profiles could take a couple years. Might need to put an army of machines on that task. I will start with a few trial runs, and keep you posted.
