Generating a Hot Trends Application for Facebook

I want to build an application on Facebook that will capture the "hot trends" in Facebook. The application will have multiple components: 1. The "crawler": Given a set of userIDs, get the information that appears in their profiles, and store it in a relational database. (I have the code for retrieving efficiently the UserInfo in XML using the Facebook API.) The crawler should be programmed in such a way, so that it can run every 12 or 24 hours, without any supervision (e.g., using cron.). So, the real requirement for the crawler are: (a) Make it to run unsupervised (right now, it required the user to login using a browser), and (b) insert the XML data in a relational database. 2. The "application hot trends": Once we start collecting information about the user profiles, we can then start analyzing the data to find: (a) popular items for music, books, and other items that appear in the profiles, and (b) items that have sudden increases and/or decreases. Facebook users should be able to add the application in their profiles and see what is hot in general. They should also be able to restrict to specific parts of the population, (say people that are born in a specific year) and see the respective data trends only for that part of the population. This should be a Facebook application. 3. The "leader/laggard or mainstream/unconventional" facebook application. The user should add the information to their profile, and then the application will analyze all the items that appear in the user profile. The application will identify whether the items in the profile are now increasing in popularity, whether they are stable, or whether they are decreasing, and mark all of them appropriately. It should also analyze the relative popularity of the items in the profile, to categorize the user as, say "TV: 60% mainstream, 10% unconventional" "Books: 3% mainstream, 80% unconventional", "Overall: 45% mainstream". Similarly, for the "leader/laggard" part. ## Deliverables 1) Complete and fully-functional working program(s) in executable form as well as complete source code of all work done. 2) Deliverables must be in ready-to-run condition, as follows (depending on the nature of the deliverables): a) For web sites or other server-side deliverables intended to only ever exist in one place in the Buyer's environment--Deliverables must be installed by the Seller in ready-to-run condition in the Buyer's environment. b) For all others including desktop software or software the buyer intends to distribute: A software installation package that will install the software in ready-to-run condition on the platform(s) specified in this bid request. 3) All deliverables will be considered "work made for hire" under U.S. Copyright law. Buyer will receive exclusive and complete copyrights to all work purchased. (No GPL, GNU, 3rd party components, etc. unless all copyright ramifications are explained AND AGREED TO by the buyer on the site per the coder's Seller Legal Agreement). ## Platform I plan to host the application in a Windows IIS server, and the database will be a MS SQL Server 2005.