ex.plode.us was a website search engine that indexed people. It was created b
Curverider
the creators of the

Elgg Elgg is a municipality in the district of Winterthur in the canton of Zürich in Switzerland. On 1 January 2018 the former municipality of Hofstetten merged into the municipality of Elgg. History Elgg ( la, Elgovia, Sacer pagus) is first menti ...

social networking platform. Ex.plode.us aggregated social data from 43 Things,

flickr Flickr ( ; ) is an American image hosting and video hosting service, as well as an online community, founded in Canada and headquartered in the United States. It was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and was a popular way for amateur and profession ...

, jaiku, Live Journal, tribe.net,

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

, and

YouTube YouTube is a global online video sharing and social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by Google, and is the second mo ...

. Initially launched as Explode! in February 2007 as purely a

social network aggregation Social network aggregation is the process of collecting content from multiple social network services into one unified presentation. The task is often performed by a social network aggregator, such as Hootsuite or FriendFeed, which pulls together ...

utility and widget it was re-launched in May 2007 as a people search engine. In August 2007 a

Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Mosk ...

version was released, taking advantage of the recently opened Facebook

API An application programming interface (API) is a way for two or more computer programs to communicate with each other. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how ...

. However, the Facebook application did not allow ex.plode.us to aggregate information from Facebook. In February 2008 a discussion on tribe.net dominated by tribe users who voiced privacy concerns resulted in tribe.net blocking ex.plode.us from accessing tribe users'

FOAF FOAF (an acronym of friend of a friend) is a machine-readable ontology describing persons, their activities and their relations to other people and objects. Anyone can use FOAF to describe themselves. FOAF allows groups of people to describe soc ...

data. Individuals who were users of both ex.plode.us and tribe.net lost a great deal of their network on ex.plode.us. As of February 2010, ex.plode.us no longer exists. It had hacked into some YouTube users accounts to get the 'sign up name' to display with the 'user name'. Google still has searches related to this hacking.

API

The site offered a REST-style API, which no longer exists.

References

External links

Official press release

Look Out MyBlogLog - Here Comes Explode

Explode adds people search

Explode is a New Social Search Engine

Explode - A social network connection
Defunct internet search engines Social search Defunct online companies {{Web-stub