Spokeo

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Spokeo
Type Private
Founded Saratoga, California (2006)
Headquarters Mountain View, California
Key people Harrison Tang, Ray Chen, Eric Liang, Mike Daly
Industry Software & Programming
Website spokeo.com

Spokeo is a hyper-aggregator that automatically finds all your friends' social network accounts by performing deep Web searches across 40+ social networks. [1] Spokeo supports Bebo, Blogger, DailyMotion, DeviantArt, Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Fotolog, Friendster, HI5, ImageStation, Imeem, Last.fm, LiveJournal, MySpace, Netlog, Photobucket, PictureTrail, Vox, Webshots, Windows Live Spaces, Wretch, Xanga, Yahoo Video, YouTube, and more. [2]

Spokeo first finds your friends' accounts on all the major social networks. It then organizes this information into an IM-style buddy list. This aggregation of services into a buddy list has drawn comparisons of Spokeo to Trillian.

Spokeo was founded by Stanford graduates in 2006. It is implemented in Ruby on Rails. [3]

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[edit] Misconception

Spokeo is not a social network. It does not support messaging, blogging, custom profiles, or any social network features. Moreover, it syndicates only publicly available information. Spokeo does not break privacy barriers to show you what content you do not have access to. [4]

[edit] Controversy

Spokeo has been in the news for aggregating information that not commonly known to be public. [5]

[edit] References

  1. ^ Friends Under The Microscope, January 28, 2008
  2. ^ Spokeo 2.0: A Feed Reader For Your Friends, December 10, 2007
  3. ^ Spokeo: Meta Social Networking, December 8, 2006
  4. ^ The RSS Blog on Spokeo, November 30, 2006
  5. ^ New Sites Make It Easier To Spy on Your Friends, May 13, 2008

[edit] See also