[pjungwir]

I started a project similar to talentbin.com: scraping Github, StackOverflow, and about two dozen other sites to compile searchable developer profiles. Figuring out when a Github and StackOverflow profile belonged to the same person was a pretty fun challenge. Eventually I abandoned it though, because it felt like I was just enabling keyword-based recruiter spam. Selling it to people made me feel bad instead of good.

[zvitez]

Good on you for being so altruistic. Do you think there's any way to leverage that while making it desirable for the developers? Imagine you have great offers that you know would be valuable to the people you found. Would it be spam to share it?

[pjungwir]

Well I did believe that when I started the project. I don't know if quitting was altruism. Selling is hard enough for a programmer like me, but for this project I really recoiled from it. My heart just wasn't in it. Perhaps if communications were opt-in for the developers and we controlled the communications channel it would be okay. This piece might be worth keeping: The site scored each developer on various skills, so users could see that a person was better than 87% of their peers worldwide and better than 93% of people within 100 miles, etc. You could still use the whole population to compile those stats, even if only some people had opted in to communications. (Of course the score was based only on public data, so it was not perfect, but still it seemed like a pretty strong signal when I looked at it for people I know.)