Question about what language and perhaps suggestions on how it might be done.

[Sorc.Polgara]

Ok, so I looked at a couple of things, AIM Fight and The latest 40 images posted to Live Journal web sites and thought of a project that would be interesting.

If any of you have heard of Facebook, well it's basically a College/University networking (not in a technology sense) website.  I'm thinking about making a site that would basically parse the profile of a someone at your College or University by inputting a link/url to their profile and a link/url to your profile.  It will then figure out how many things you have in common with that person.

Here is a link to a screenshot of a limited access view of my Facebook profile... a full access view would show you my cell phone number and other stuff like that.  Just to be a little safer, I won't give out. I couldn't take a full screenshot of the page because it is much longer.  It's just an example anyways.

http://www.filefarmer.com/mds820/images/facebook.gif

Ok, so like all the things in the screenshot towards the left of my portrait that look like links, are in fact links to pages that will give you a list of all those who have the same thing, or something simliar to it in their profile also.

So for instance, if I click on the link for my birthday "02/03/87", it would bring me to either a page with just my name and some information in as search results (if noone has the same birthday as me) or with the names and information of those persons at my University that have the same birthday as me.  When done for real, there is only one other person besides me that has my birthday, since this is a small school.

Now, Facebook has privacy settings that can be changed.  The default setting allows everyone at your College/University to view your profile.  Other options include only to allow those who are your friends or friends of friends to view your profile and/or allow people at other schools to find you on a global search.

When you click on a link in your or someone elses profile to see who has something like it too, it will simply display their picture (if they include one) and just simple information like their name, graduation year, major/field, dorm building name,  and status (student, alumnus/alumni, faculty etc.).  Although it does depending on if they filled those fields in on their profile.

Now if you have the default settings, settings that allow everyone at the school to see your profile, or you are some how connected to the person in the search results as either a friend or friend of friend, then you'll be able to click on the picture of them and be directed to view their profile.

So I need to know a few things first from some of you who might be more experienced with either web-based languages and/or have suggestions/advice.

1.  Is such a thing possible and/or viable?
2.  If yes to #1 then what would be the best language to use?

I'm not very experienced with web/internet languages except basic HTML, however I can probably learn fairly quickly.  This seems like an interesting project to do... and kill two birds with one stone by enhancing my stalker skills. jk.

Thanks for reading or not reading this post.  hahaha.

EDIT:  I didn't know what forum to post in, so I decided to do it in this one.

[Stealth]

Facebook is really just a giant set of relational databases. It's written with PHP and (presumably) MySQL, though it could be done with any server-side scripting language and database pair.

The complexity and functionality of Facebook leads me to believe there's some very advanced MySQL behind it.

[Sorc.Polgara]

hmmm ok so I opened up the page source and most of the links have hrefs that begin with "p.php?s&x=t&q=" + whatever the text in the profile is, or "p.php?s&x=" + some id + the text. 

So like I copied and pasted one of the links hrefs onto the address bar in the browers and nothing turned up.  However, when I put "http://longwood.facebook.com/" + the href it worked.

So like yeah.  I guess I just need to figure out a way to like write something that will load a page and then scan through it looking for the various field ids or whatever they are and other stuff that I still have to explore... but I need a language to work with.  PHP is what it looks like I'm going to need to learn.

[Mangix]

you dont HAVE to code it in PHP. If the server has CGI Installed, you can use Perl or some other language

[rabbit]

PHP is easiest though.

[hismajesty]

Download each pages source (since it's PHP the rendered source will most likely just be a little bit of html and the actual data.) Go through it and split up the information and assign the data to variables or a database or whatever, variables would be better if it's short-term. Then go through and compare it, and display.

PHP.