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| Type of business | Private |
|---|---|
| Type of site | people search engine |
| Available in | English |
| Founded | Saratoga, California (2006) |
| Headquarters | Mountain View, California |
| Key people | Harrison Tang |
| Industry | Computer Software |
| Products | Spokeo People Search |
| URL | Spokeo People Search |
| Registration | Required |
| Launched | 11/5/2006 |
| Current status | active |
Spokeo is a social-network-based people search engine. Unlike other people search engines that search for one person at a time, Spokeo imports an user's webmail address book and makes all contacts' online footprints instantly available. Spokeo finds people's social network accounts by performing deep Web searches across over 40 such networks, including but not limited to Bebo, Blogger, DailyMotion, DeviantArt, Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Fotolog, Friendster, HI5, ImageStation, Imeem, Last.fm, LiveJournal, MySpace, Netlog, Photobucket, Vox, Webshots, Windows Live Spaces, Wretch, Xanga, Yahoo Video, and YouTube.
Spokeo is strictly a search engine, not a social network.
Technology
Spokeo's main technology is a social-network-based deep Web search engine that can dig up social data that standard search engines like Google don't even index. These social data can include but not limited to your Amazon Wish List, your kids' photos, your musical tastes, and much, much more.. Although Spokeo syndicates only publicly available information,, the information that it aggregates may not always be commonly known to be public by most people.
Spokeo is implemented in Ruby on Rails. Launched in 2006, it is one of the early Ruby on Rails showcases.
History
Spokeo was founded in early 2006 by four Stanford students. Spokeo 1.0 pioneered and introduced the concept of social network aggregation to the world on CNet, GigaOm and TechCrunch on November 2006. This concept would quickly catch on among early adopters, and the most popular social network aggregator today is FriendFeed.
Spokeo 2.0 launched on TechCrunch a year later on December 2007. Initially, Spokeo 2.0 introduced its people search technology to help users automatically aggregate their social network accounts. As the time went on, however, people talked more about Spokeo's people search capabilities more than its aggregator roots. Spokeo rebranded itself as a people search engine later that year.
Content Privacy
Spokeo aggregates only publicly available information; however, the information that it aggregates are often obscure and very hard to find on the Web. To better educate users about their online privacy, Spokeo has developed an automatic Content Privacy Mirroring technology. When someone finds their content out in public through Spokeo and then makes them private, Spokeo will automatically detect and reflect these latest privacy changes in couple days. That said, since people search engines like Spokeo make it so easy to dig out obscure social data around the Web, many people are still worried about their online content exposed by these new social search technologies.
Competition
Couple people search engines have similar social-network-based deep Web technologies like Spokeo, including Pipl.com, Spock.com, Wink.com, 123People.com, and YoName.com. Only Spokeo supports the address book search.
See also
References
- Spokeo People Search - Traffic Details from Alexa, April 8, 2009.
- Spokeo People Search - The Mega Search of Social Networks, April 8, 2009
- Friends Under The Microscope, January 28, 2008
- New site feeds off of other Web sites, January 31, 2008
- Growing Number of Supported Networks by Spokeo People Search, April 8, 2009
- Spokeo People Search Engines: They Know Your Dark Secrets ... And Tell Anyone, March 10, 2009
- The RSS Blog on Spokeo People Search, November 30, 2006
- New Sites Make It Easier To Spy on Your Friends, May 13, 2008
- Spokeo People Search: Meta Social Networking, December 8, 2006
- Your Next Social Network: All of Them?, December 5, 2006
- The Content Aggregators and the Fat Belly, November 28, 2006
- Spokeo People Search Aggregates Social Networks And Blogs, November 29, 2006
- Spokeo People Search 2.0: A Feed Reader For Your Friends, December 10, 2007
- Reality Check: Spokeo People Search, December 21, 2007
- Spokeo People Search Privacy Explained, March 1, 2009
- Social media search: A stalker's paradise?, January 26, 2009