Spokeo Aggregates Social Networks And Blogs

spokeologo.jpgSpokeo wants to be your home page. They want to bring you your favorite blog feeds, MySpace updates, new YouTube videos, and friends’ photo albums all in one eyeful.

Spokeo combines the top 20 social networking destinations with any RSS feeds you like into one glimpse through a multimedia RSS reader. But you can’t actually navigate within the networks. It just gives you a run-down. Sort of like My Yahoo! for Web 2.0 sites.

“The problem with start pages like My Yahoo! is the personalization part,” said Harrison Tang, founder of Spokeo, in a phone conversation on Wednesday. “People don’t really know how to add content. It takes like ten steps and a lot of people don’t know how to do it. So we’re assuming that most people are interested in reading online information on the same page that tells you where your friends are, what pictures they’re taking, and what your favorite blogs like TechCrunch are saying.” [I swear he said TechCrunch!]

This is a great idea but it needs some work. For starters, (and here is the woman in me speaking), it’s just not pretty. And it could learn from My Yahoo! and at least give me my local weather. Also, it’s not easy to import information to the site. I tried to get it to feed my MySpace info and somehow ended up with MySpace buddies and information for someone named Gnatalie instead. Shouldn’t I need a password to do that? Consequently, I had a pretty hard time figuring out how to get Gnatalie off of my page and get my own MySpace information on.

Your Spokeo home page is organized into three categories on the side bar: Me, My Friends, and Featured Users. Users can then navigate what their friends or popular Spokeos are up to based on their tags or activities.

Spokeo was started by four Stanford buddies who love MySpace and Flickr and quite obviously TechCrunch and were tired of not having all of their info in one place. The site was funded through “angel investors” so far…meaning their parents.

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