ex.plode.us was a website

search engine A search engine is a software system that provides hyperlinks to web pages, and other relevant information on World Wide Web, the Web in response to a user's web query, query. The user enters a query in a web browser or a mobile app, and the sea ...

that indexed people. It was created by 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 () is first mentioned between 760 and 763 ...

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

flickr Flickr ( ) is an image hosting service, image and Online video platform, 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 previously a co ...

jaiku Jaiku was a social networking, micro-blogging and lifestreaming service comparable to Twitter, founded a month before the latter. Jaiku was founded in February 2006 by Jyri Engeström and Petteri Koponen from Finland and launched in July of that ...

Live Journal LiveJournal (), stylised as LiVEJOURNAL, is a Russian-owned social networking service where users can keep a blog, journal, or diary. American programmer Brad Fitzpatrick started LiveJournal on April 15, 1999, as a way of keeping his high school ...

, tribe.net,

Twitter Twitter, officially known as X since 2023, is an American microblogging and social networking service. It is one of the world's largest social media platforms and one of the most-visited websites. Users can share short text messages, image ...

, and

YouTube YouTube is an American social media and online video sharing platform owned by Google. YouTube was founded on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim who were three former employees of PayPal. Headquartered in ...

. 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 a unified presentation. Examples of social network aggregators include Hootsuite or FriendFeed, which may pull together information into a s ...

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

Facebook Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms, Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andre ...

version was released, taking advantage of the recently opened Facebook

API An application programming interface (API) is a connection between computers or between computer programs. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how to build ...

. 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 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