Spokeo

So,

sent me an email asking me if I had ever heard of Spokeo.com because she got an email from them saying that someone was searching for her and found her on X social networking sites. It was sorta spammy, so she asked me if I knew anything. Well, I googled them and found out they are a one-stop shop for keeping track of social networking accounts. Having some friends on MySpace, others on FaceBook, Flickr, Picassa, etc (ironically enough, they don’t offer LJ) gets a little annoying because there is only so much time one should spend looking at everyone’s updates on all the different sites. Well, in comes Spokeo:

As a Stanford student, Harrison liked to jump around different social networks.  Sure, he had friends on MySpace, but his more literary friends preferred Xanga, his picture-happy buddies used Flickr, and his dormmates were always forwarding YouTube videos.  Harrison was having trouble keeping up. 

Spokeo began as a tool to update Harrison across these websites.  It was originally created by a few Stanford classmates in 2006 working out of Harrison’s basement.  Today, Spokeo finds and tracks all your friends’ blogs, pics, and videos.  Spokeo is located in Mountain View, CA. Contact us for any questions.

It is a great idea but I can’t shake the creepy factor from it. They do try and shake that off by letting people know that hey, someone found you on there (not necessarily looked for you, but found you) and if you don’t want them to stalk you with Spokeo, then you’d better “flock” your accounts. It searches all public accounts associated with the email addresses in your address book and aggregates them so they aren’t necessarily breaking any rules (that I can think of off the top of my head).

If you got an invite from me, I apologize. I misunderstood when it asked me who I wanted to be connected with, I assumed that it wanted to know who it should add to my buddy list (ex: I am not interested in that one person that I emailed that one time). What it really meant was “who from the list below do you not mind blowing your stalker cover from because we are gonna send them an invite on your behalf?” 😀

I guess that takes away a big part of the creepazoid factor, until you have to explain the entire thing to your friends again.

To make matters even more moot, I don’t think I will continue to use the service after the trial run because my address book is just too big to sit there for me to organize. I guess I will simply continue to stalk you all the old fashioned way, like

said.