FullContact Blog
fullcontact.com · Company blog · on HN since 2011
FullContact's company blog covers its contact data and identity resolution API, along with engineering, infrastructure, and workplace culture posts.
What HN saysMostly appears in hiring threads for its Denver team and as a contact management tool; commenters give no detailed opinion of the blog.
49HN people shared it
32linked it in comments
122stories submitted
1.1Kstory points
5 years agolast shared
2011people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1An API that turns partial contacts into full contacts16 people · 1 points · first shared 2012 · discussion on HN
- 2Paid Vacation? Not Cool. You Know What’s Cool? Paid, PAID Vacation8 people · 4 points · first shared 2013 · discussion on HN
- 3Careers5 people · first shared 2014
- 4Migrating from MongoDB to Cassandra4 people · 126 points · first shared 2013 · 63 comments on HN
- 5Paid Vacation? That’s Not Cool. You Know What’s Cool? Paid, Paid Vacation.3 people · 388 points · first shared 2012 · 308 comments on HN
- 6Denver3 people · first shared 2016
- 7How we used immutable servers to simplify cloud infrastructure2 people · 10 points · first shared 2013 · discussion on HN
- 8A look at how FullContact built their social data search engine2 people · 7 points · first shared 2014 · discussion on HN
- 9Developer2 people · first shared 2012
- 10Person2 people · first shared 2014
- 11Don't Get Grinfucked By Your Users1 people · 70 points · first shared 2012 · 30 comments on HN
- 12LinkedIn’s Bad Terms of Service1 people · 40 points · first shared 2014 · 19 comments on HN
- 13Your Mom is Not a Valid Test Market1 people · 39 points · first shared 2012 · 12 comments on HN
- 14Denver's gSchool: 6 months and 60 hours per week turns you into a web developer1 people · 36 points · first shared 2012 · 51 comments on HN
- 15Scan business cards into more than 250 apps1 people · 34 points · first shared 2014 · 15 comments on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
zarlen · 2016-10-03
FullContact (http://fullcontact.com) | Denver, CO | Platform Engineer | Full-Time
We're building a core contact management / identity resolution platform that enables single users / businesses / enterprises utilize us as a their core solution. Think Slack / Dropbox for Contacts.
We Love Clojure / Java, and run on AWS. Too many technologies to list here.
Apply Here: https://www.fullcontact.com/about/careers/denver/
kylelibra · 2014-07-31
The post offers Full Contact (http://www.fullcontact.com/) and Vibe (http://vibeapp.co/) as alternatives. Does anyone have any other recommendations?
chadkruse · 2014-03-14
I also use Streak for a very lightweight CRM. Works great for identifying prospects and moving them through the close process.
I'm also keeping an eye on FullContact. A few slight tweaks to their tagging feature and they'll be a great lightweight CRM for solo folks.
http://www.fullcontact.com/
b1ake · 2012-12-20
Yeah we love it for two reasons:
1. Our users can send messages to us from inside the app. They end us using this to communicate with us more than email.
2. The dashboard for site owners is awesome. It shows you overall user count, who is logged in right now, each user's social networks (pulled automatically using http://www.fullcontact.com), and gives you a whole bunch of ways to filter the information.
dcwilson · 2017-06-01
FullContact | Multiple Positions | Denver, CO | ONSITE, https://www.fullcontact.com
We’re solving the world’s contact information problem and looking for amazingly talented people to join our team in downtown Denver. We're a primarily JVM focused shop with some very challenging data and scale problems for you to tackle. If you're interested in working with large, messy datasets at scale, we'd love to talk with you.
In addition to challenging technology problems and a great team, we offer 100% paid healthcare for you and your family, parking and transit reimbursement, and a $7,500 "paid paid vacation" stipend, among other benefits.
Open positions:
Senior Software Engineer, Data Platform: http://careers.fullcontact.com/apply/prDdh5Ccsl/Senior-Engineer-Data-P…
DevOps / SRE: http://careers.fullcontact.com/apply/Pe4tbk/DevOps-SRE
Product Manager, API Platform: http://careers.fullcontact.com/apply/qQEfg4/Product-Manager-API-Platfo…
rdegges · 2015-09-15
I started working as a Developer Evangelist about a year and a half ago, and was having a pretty nasty problem dealing with contacts myself. I keep meeting people all the time, and want some way to:
* Have their contact info auto-imported if I add them as a friend in SOME WAY: either by emailing them, tweeting them, messaging them, whatever.
* Have all my contacts synced into one centralized data store (Google Contacts, in my case).
* Merge and remove duplicate contacts so I don't have to deal with 50 entries of people...
What I ended up settling on is really working well for the past year or so.
I use Google contacts as my primary datastore. I then use FullContact (free): https://www.fullcontact.com/
FullContact will hook into everything, eg: Google / Twitter / Facebook / LinkedIn / etc., grab EVERYONE'S contact info, and merge it into one record, then merge that back into Google contacts =)
Would highly recommend it.
kuschku · 2019-03-08
Actually (after contacting their support because of wrong data that was returned for my contact), they seem to be using https://clearbit.com/ instead as backend.
enrich.email also does the same, though.
There’s also https://fullcontact.com.
In the end they all just search and scrape social media profiles and gravatar.
mcmancsu · 2018-09-07
FullContact (https://fullcontact.com) | Denver, Boulder | Full-Time | On-site
FullContact’s mission is to help the world stay fully connected, master its contacts, and be awesome with people. (& yes - all roles include FULL medical and $7,500 Paid PAID Vacation: https://www.fullcontact.com/blog/paid-paid-vacation/)
We are currently hiring:
* Senior Software Engineer - Data Platform
* Senior Solutions Software Engineer - Solution Engineering
More details about the open positions: https://www.fullcontact.com/about/careers/
mooreds · 2016-11-12
These folks have done a lot around contact management. May be worth a read: https://www.fullcontact.com/blog/contact-versioning/
alexmeng · 2016-07-01
FullContact (https://fullcontact.com) | Denver, Boulder, Dallas, Riga | Full-Time | Remote or On-site
FullContact’s mission is to help the world stay fully connected, master its contacts, and be awesome with people.
We are currently hiring:
* DevOps / SRE
* UX Designer
* Developer Evangelist
More details about the open positions: https://www.fullcontact.com/about/careers/
sanderjd · 2014-06-03
I've always thought that FullContact[0] has a pretty nifty way of showing that yes, they really are serious about vacation time. In addition to having an "open" vacation policy like the one described in the OP, they also have what they call "PAID, paid vacation", which is where one time a year they pay you $7500 on top of your salary to take a vacation, as long as you promise to not do any work. Haven't seen anybody else with a policy like that, but I'd love to see it become a trend.
[1]: http://www.fullcontact.com/about/careers/
wdepril · 2013-06-01
Denver, CO, USA - FullContact (http://www.fullcontact.com)
We're solving the world’s contact information problem. As we like to say, "If you've got an address book, you've got an address book problem." Most people have duplicate contacts, partial records, and out of date records . . . and they're scattered everywhere! It's a mess.
We are looking for super talented developers to join our team. We consider relocation but the final goal is to join our team full time in Denver.
-Senior Java Engineer
-QA/Automation Engineer
-Full Stack Web Developer
Our tech stack consists of JVM languages - java-Groovy-Scala/HBase/MySQL/Hadoop/Storm/amazon AWS/Elastic Search
And of course all of this comes with PAID PAID vacation : http://www.fullcontact.com/blog/paid-paid-vacation/
check out http://fullcontact.theresumator.com/apply/
or send me an email at jobs+hn %at% fullcontact.com
noveltysystems · 2012-07-17
I've never had a problem with SendGrid, absolutely love their SMTP and Parse APIs!
Check out the FullContact API http://www.fullcontact.com/developer/.
b4c0n · 2012-07-15
I agree 100% about spending some time in a different headspace than one that is getting you nowhere - but to point just fingers at the 2 posts today that tipped me over the edge, this is the mentality I am referencing:
http://www.fullcontact.com/2012/07/10/paid-paid-vacation/
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4215912 (the comment which begins "If you're 17 and already a decent programmer, my best advice to you is to have some fun and exercise")
It just seems strange to me someone asking "how do I become a better programmer" is "Exercise". This mentality of "Be a better programmer by being less of a programmer" confuses me.
dtsingletary · 2012-07-13
Parse's portal gets a great melding of form, function, and philosophy. http://www.parse.com
FullContact's portal has some nifty navigation on the documentation: http://www.fullcontact.com/developer/docs/
An honorable mention should goto the creativity behind Twitter's Field Guide: https://dev.twitter.com/docs/platform-objects
scailer · 2021-07-08
Thank you for the feedback about the web site. You are right, we will update our web site and put pricing information when it will be ready. Currently the application is in beta and free for use. Furthermore first 100 users provided feedback to the application will get a released version for free. Pricing will be easily affordable – about the price of a coffee for individuals or a client lunch for business users. You can find similar text on the web site.
Regarding “ethically sourced contacts”. Scailer finds an avatar and social profile links (linkedin, facebook) of a particular contact in the internet using the FullContact service as a data source. Scailer shows avatars of contacts in the left panel. That feature improves Scailer’s user experience. “Ethically” means that Scailer uses only public information: public avatars and public social profile links, and Scailer does not share that information to 3d-parties, and does not use it for advertisement. Scailer caches contact information retrieved from FullContact because of FullContact recommendation. Scailer does not store on any servers any link between email address of user and requested contact. You can find FullContact’s privacy policy here: https://www.fullcontact.com/privacy/privacy-policy/
Of course no messages are passed to the server. Scailer connects to a IMAP server (gmail, office365) using a secure channel and stores message cache in local encrypted database. It allows Scailer to work with old messages in…
dmourati · 2017-05-19
I found segment.io in the early days of a new job and quickly set it up. I started playing with it and siphoning off some live data using a pretty rough shell script calling curl. Peter and another colleague saw what I was doing and came to my company to meet in person. I recall booking the largest, most impressive conference room we had and a 10AM meeting.
Peter and his colleague showed up and walked me through using Segment. The told me that I was the only one using their API via curl and that they were impressed with what I had been able to cobble together so quickly.
Peter took out a tiny Moleskine-type notebook and drew a diagram of what was next on the roadmap for Segment. I recall how neat and detailed the diagram was and how thoughtful Peter was about what he was doing next.
Peter and his colleague also revealed to me a sort of sister company they were familiar with that was creating an API around professional identity as a service. This sounded a lot like https://www.fullcontact.com/ but was something else.
I've since moved on from focusing on that type of data. HN seems to feature a fair amount of content about Segment. I enjoy keeping up with their progress and wish them all well.
tgarma1234 · 2017-03-06
Reading this thread I can answer the question because I have worked in this industry and given/sold data to Intellius specifically.
There are three main sources of ALL of the data:
1. Acxiom http://www.acxiom.com/
2. Experian http://www.experian.com/
3. Neustar https://www.neustar.biz/
Acxiom got it's big start by developing a way to copy phone books in the 90s and they won a court case that sided with them saying the name and address information was basically public info. Acxiom aggregates something like 800 different attributes for each named person at each address using third party vendors and then resells the entire consumer database to list brokers who often times will add additional detail for smaller subsets of the data. You can opt out of Acxiom by going here
http://www.acxiom.com/about-acxiom/privacy/consumer-data-information/
2. Experian. Same as above but they have a lot more specific data about you because you probably fill out forms related to credit and loan applications correctly. Thus they know all of you previous addresses and they sell that to companies like Intellius.
3. neustar: ditto.
The main thing to keep in mind is that each of those three companies have slightly different channels through which they aggregate consumer data so your info comes out a little differently in each database.
Almost any list broker or mailing house or telemarketer that you encounter is getting their data ultimately from one of those three companies (and in many…
67726e · 2014-07-28
Seems like Full Contact? http://www.fullcontact.com/
dshearmur · 2012-09-18
Take a look at http://www.fullcontact.com
JoeSorrow · 2020-04-02
FullContact | Principal Algorithm Engineer and Sr. Data Engineer | ONSITE (Denver) and REMOTE | Full-time
FullContact is a privacy-safe Identity Resolution company building trust between people and brands. We deliver the capabilities needed to create tailored customer experiences by unifying data and applying insights in the moments that matter.
We're looking for creative, collaborative, and curious engineers to join our Identity Resolution team. We have exciting tech and are continuing to grow.
https://www.fullcontact.com/careers/
lloyddobbler · 2019-09-23
I'm a huge fan of this. Have done it many times, and it's an important exercise. Keeps you in the moment.
Related: See FullContact's Paid Paid Vacation policy:
https://www.fullcontact.com/blog/paid-paid-vacation/
harshgupta · 2018-06-04
Just after acquisition, Linkedin started systematically shutting down available API resources, and removing CRM support. Microsoft reigns in eventually.
source:https://www.fullcontact.com/blog/linkedin-state-of-crm-2014/
redacted: i mistook the acquisition date
kumarski · 2016-02-15
Relevant Scraping/Crawling Lead Mining Tools:
http://grabby.io
http://fullcontact.com
http://emailhunter.co
http://clearbit.com
http://toofr.com
http://import.io
http://kimonolabs.com
http://apifier.com (favs)
http://elink.club
http://www.eliteproxyswitcher.com/ - ;)
Xorlev · 2015-12-22
https://www.fullcontact.com/privacy/ If it's coming through our FullContact Person API, you can claim your profile or opt out here.
jedc · 2014-12-10
Full Contact does the same thing: employees get $7500 to go on vacation, but only get it if they actually go on vacation.
https://www.fullcontact.com/blog/paid-paid-vacation/
ptnapoleon · 2014-08-04
Here are two blog posts I was able to find from companies who switched Mongo -> Cassandra:
http://www.fullcontact.com/blog/mongo-to-cassandra-migration/
http://relistan.com/cassandra-vs-mongo/
The main selling points for Cassandra over Mongo are that it scales to more machines easier for handling larger workloads, and the write performance is better.
mbesto · 2014-07-31
Curious, is there an API that I can send an email string to and get all of their social profiles listed? For example, I put in [email protected] and get facebook.com/mike, twitter.com/mikeguy1, etc
EDIT: Looks like FullContact does this: http://www.fullcontact.com/developer/docs/person/
nemothekid · 2014-03-31
I can't speak for everyone, but to me MongoDB is far easier than any other NoSQL engine I've looking into. The reason why I said "probably" because I can't speak for every NoSQL database out there.
We had a 5 node cluster in Mongo that we moved to Cassandra last summer. While our experience with Cassandra is by and large much more performant and cost effective than MongoDB, getting setup with Cassandra was not as easy with MongoDB. With MongoDB you can literally start throwing data in your database, then add an index after the fact. With Cassandra we had to make sure our data was modeled correctly, and decide where we would denormalize. Riak from what I remember has a similar data model to Cassandra, and Redis isn't something you just "start up and go" (mainly because its an in memory store).
So I know for a fact that Cassandra, Riak, Dynamo, and Redis are far more complex than MongoDB. Cassandra even requires you run a "repair" command periodically, and that alone makes it more ops work than Cassandra. We can even throw HBase in there too as it requires Zookeeper nodes, Named Nodes, and all that Hadoop goodness.
Now none of these databases are hard to use, but compared to mongo, mongo is a cakewalk. You literally spin it up, throw json inside, and get json back. There is no query writing, and for most cases there is very little ops management. In most cases if a query is slow, you can fix that by adding an index, or moving to SSDs, only once you have exhausted these…