Will it still work in two years?

Every few months someone shows me a tool that "scrapes all social media and visualizes it". It's usually impressive. I ask one question: will it still work in two years?

The honest answer is almost always no. Not because the people who built it are bad at their jobs, but because of how it's built. A scraper knows what a profile page looks like. It knows where the name sits, where the followers are, which element holds the bio. The day the platform redesigns that page, and they all do, constantly and sometimes on purpose, the scraper goes blind.

Then someone has to fix it. Then it breaks again. Multiply that by every platform the tool claims to support and you have a maintenance treadmill that kills most of these projects inside two years. The graveyard of OSINT tools is full of them.

Ubikron doesn't know it's on TikTok

We made a deliberate choice early on: Ubikron is site-agnostic. It doesn't know it's on TikTok, X or Instagram, and it doesn't care. It captures what's on your screen: the text, a screenshot and the time. Entity extraction works on the text, not on a particular page layout.

So when a site rebuilds itself next month, nothing breaks. You browse the new version exactly like you browsed the old one, and Ubikron records it exactly like it recorded the old one.

That's less magical than a tool that claims to pull everything automatically. It's also the reason you can build an investigation workflow on it and still have that workflow next year.

The flashy tool gets you a great demo. The boring architecture gets you a tool that's still there when the case comes back.

We've been at this idea since 2017. Durability isn't a feature we bolted on. It's the whole point.

Roelof TemminghFounder, Ubikron