"Facebook's contention was robots.txt had no legal force and they could sue anyone for accessing their site even if they scrupulously obeyed the instructions it contained. The only legal way to access any web site with a crawler was to obtain prior written permission. Obviously this isn't the way the web has worked for the last 16 years since robots.txt was introduced, but my lawyer advised me that it had never been tested in court, and the legal costs alone of being a test case would bankrupt me."

To write this piece, we cataloged over 7,000 photographs on OkCupid.com, analyzing three primary things (Facial Attitude, Photo Context, Skin). We discovered much of the collective wisdom about profile pictures was wrong.

It seems to have passed without huge fanfare, but on April 20th 2006, the Alexa rankings for tech sites around the globe suddenly doubled, literally overnight.