Well, I found this interview with the founder of Friendster, and it definitely dispels any idea I had that they were aware of the possibility of mining the valuable data that they have collected. This guy is a total fucking dumbass. He answers “I don’t know” in different forms to over half of the very simple questions posed by the interviewer.

I think the technical term that I am looking for is “community data-mining” (although it may be called other things too) and I found another article off the same site which discusses it if you scroll down to the question about strategies and challenges of community data mining. Anyway, just the tip of the iceberg, really.