Exclusive: Facebook Whisperer Speaks About Why Facebook Threatened to Sue Him

Computer programmer Pete Warden speaks about the massive social network enlightenment that Facebook's datasets could herald--and why it all went off the rails.

Pete Warden's been called the "Facebook Whisperer," because of an unusual hobby he took up more than a year ago. Using simple web crawling software, he assembled a database of 210 million Facebook public profiles: Names, "fan" pages, friend listings, and locations. He then used that data to find, for example, where "God" was the top...