How does Mailchimp's Social Pro work? [closed]

Question

I've recently used social pro from mailchimp on a site...

http://www.mailchimp.com/features/social-pro/

and was shocked to find the amount of information it can gether online using just a few user details. How does it work? What APIs does it use, and how could I recreate a similar experience?

Answer 1

they say something about http://www.rapleaf.com (and it provides API). I am not sure that it is the only source, but worth checking.

Sync your lists with social and demographic data from Rapleaf to enhance your subscriber profiles

Answer 2

Probably a combination of many data sources. At minimum, tracing gravatars probably provide a lot of that data, and you can infer a lot from backlinks and rel=me as well.