Reverse Engineering Facebook with Alex Hogue

“Graphing when your Facebook Friends are awake” was trending at the top of Hacker News when Alex Hogue first posted it. Alex wrote a blog post about this piece of software he built that interacts with public Facebook APIs to detect when any of his friends are awake or asleep.
As I read that post, I wanted to talk to Alex, because it was such a creative and technical piece of software–but it is surprising that someone would take the time to randomly inspect the elements of the Facebook page, reverse engineer the way Facebook sends data about statuses, mine data from that reverse engineering, and create a bunch of graphs about that data.

Today, Alex joins me to explain how and why he built a tool to graph when people are awake or asleep using Facebook data.