This game used the Facebook Graph API to access your friends list, profile photos, and personal details — name, location, interests, the works. These are exactly the same APIs that Cambridge Analytica exploited in 2018 to harvest data from 87 million Facebook users for political profiling. We built a fun party game; they built a surveillance machine. Facebook shut down these APIs in 2018 after the scandal broke. The game hasn’t worked since. The irony is thick — the same platform features that made silly social games possible also enabled one of the biggest privacy scandals in tech history.
Last weekend we competed in Rails Rumble 2012 — 48 hours to build a web app from scratch using Ruby on Rails, no preparation allowed. Our team was part of the Italian 48rails community, and we built Guess The Friend: a Facebook game that implements the classic Guess Who? board game, but using your real Facebook friends as characters.
The team
Four people, one weekend, zero sleep:
- Andrea Pavoni (@apeacox) — team lead, backend
- Alessandro Vendruscono (@vendruscolo) — frontend
- Claudio Floreani (@ClaudioFloreani) — design
- Marcello Barnaba (@vjt) — backend, deployment
How it works
You log in with Facebook, the app pulls your friends list with their photos and profile data, and you start a match against another player. Each of you gets assigned a “secret friend” from the other player’s friend list. Then you take turns asking yes/no questions — “Does this person live in Milan?”, “Do they have a beard?” — and eliminate candidates until you guess who it is. Simple concept, surprisingly fun when the faces staring back at you are people you actually know.
The chaos
Forty-eight hours is both a lot and nothing. You have time to build something real, but not enough to make it clean. The Facebook OAuth dance alone ate a few hours. Deployment was Unicorn behind nginx, pushed via Capistrano to a VPS — the demo ran at i.sindro.me. The code is exactly what you’d expect from a 48-hour hackathon: it works, it’s ugly, and nobody wrote tests.
Here’s a reel from the hackathon — “la leggenda del pianista sulla keyboard” — yours truly, sleep-deprived and drunk, coding in tempo with Opeth’s Windowpane during the Rails Rumble:
The code is on GitHub: andreapavoni/r12-guessthefriend (original) and vjt/guessthefriend (my fork). Don’t expect clean code and full coverage — it’s a hackathon artifact, frozen in time.