Today, the reputation network Rapleaf is releasing a new service called Upscoop, which joins a number of startups (see ProfileLinker and Wink, for example) trying to add a meta layer above social networks. There are a lot of these networks, and a lot of people belong to more than one. Keeping track of your own networks, and those of your friends, is complicated.
Upscoop is designed to help you figure out which networks your friends belong to, based on their email address. You give Upscoop your email credentials (including the password) for your AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo email account. Upscoop grabs your contact list, and then searches across a number of social networks and tries to find profile pages of people that you know among the 10 million profiles they’ve indexed across the major social networks. The process of searching is not instantaneous – it actually takes a few hours.
Clicking on any result will (sometimes) bring you to the profile page for that person. You can then add them as a friend or otherwise interact with them.
Asking people to give Upscoop their full email credentials to complete the search is going to be a tough sell. But this is a lot easier than searching for friends one-by-one on Wink. For people serious about connecting with friends, Upscoop may be for them.
anyone who provides a third-party a password to their services deserves every hack, crack, spam and identity theft coming their way.
and okay, so i have “jim smith” in my contact list at yahoo mail. what are the chances that he is using any identifiable variant of this at flickr, if he has an account? how does upscoop find “photodude” or whatever jim smith is calling himself? beware contrived demos.
Don’t know how Upscoop does it, but right away I was able to see where everyone (and by everyone I mean all my Gmail contacts) is at. This is really cool. Out of 300 ppl in my contacts, 165 showed up on Myspace, of which 40 I added. Seems like everyone is on Myspace or Linkedin. I just wish they added Facebook
Their privacy policy states that Upscoop
1. does not store your password.
2. does not send unsolicited emails (spam) and
3. does not share email addresses with any other company.
I am a big fan of advocating individuals to read a company’s privacy policy if they are sceptical about a service. Upscoop may have to add a few more features to distingush themselves from the rest of the market though. Nevertheless, this service is so easy that even my dead grandmother knows how to use it.
Guess I can’t use it… My e-mail server is on my server/domain name.
I agree with Bernadette – and why should I necessarily trust google any more than upscoop?
This seems like a cool premise for these kind of meta-trackers, but overall, it definitely needs some work. The idea that all you have to do is enter your email address it does all the work sounds great in theory, but in practice it just returns a lot of names, then tries to find those folks on networking services (most of which I don’t belong to, and don’t really care to join). If this was a person I cared about, I’d most likely already have them listed as a friend/contact on one of my services, especially since I’ve presumably been having some kind of email contact with them.
I’ll give it a go, but I am not sharing my primary email address with them. Instead:
(1) new hotmail account,
(2) export addresses from primary,
(3) import to hotmail,
(4) try upscoop, referencing the new hotmail account.
I don’t mean to be a troll, but the way you blurred your contact lists is very sketchy. I can see a couple of the email addresses with @gmail.com’s at the end. See http://dheera.n...ojects/blur.php on why blurring this way is a bad idea.
Interesting site though..
I don’t want to be a troll either, but I am genuinely interested to know how this fits into Rapleaf’s online reputation vision.
Would appreciate if a Rapleaf person could step in here and comment on that.
Thanks!
Harrynack,
With Rapleaf we’re accruing reputation related information, whether this is user-generated (in the form of ratings or feedback) or implicitly derived from social networking and online community sites (ala the “Memberships” tab in your Rapleaf profile). This implicit information gives an indication of one’s traceability, reliability, persistence, and legitimacy.
I encourage you to sign up on Rapleaf to see what I’m referring to:
http://www.rapleaf.com
After we introduced the “Memberships” product in Rapleaf, we realized that this could be useful and fun for others. I personally found out that a few of my friends were on Myspace, Friendster, Hi5, etc., and I didn’t even know it. Thus that’s how the idea for Upscoop was born. Did that answer your question?
@ Andrew – thanks for the note. Blurring just made it look aesthetically better thank blacking it out.
I’d like to think people have better things to do than reverse engineer the photo and spam random people. But who knows…
Agreed. Although sometimes I think some people might take it as a challenge to reverse them. It probably doesn’t matter for this screencap…
You can enter email addresses at https://upscoop...lts/search_more.
I like the interface of Upscoop very nice and simple to use.
A bit slow. By that I mean that between 11:00 last night and 8:00 this morning it managed to go through 14 of my contacts. Perhaps they’re under a lot of extra load because of this post.
I don’t believe it just searches for the names of people; it should search by email address. Any profile that comes up is quite likely to actually be someone you know.
Eric T said “I just wish they added Facebook.” Well, Facebook has this built in (https://registe...findfriends.php). MySpace does as well, but it’s apparently been broken for months without them bothering to fix it.
There’s also another site that lets you do the same for your Flickr contacts (http://flickrfr...innedfruit.com/) which lets you either enter your email login credentials OR upload a .cvs, .vcf, or just a text file containing multiple email addresses. Solves the security problem, if not the privacy concerns of sharing hundreds of email addresses with a relatively unknown third party. This would also solve Robert Dewey’s problem of not using one of the major webmail products. I like it a lot, and it’s absent from Upscoop.
Flickr, MySpace, and Facebook are all of the networks I know about, but I assume that all of the networks with a decent programmer on the payroll have a similar service; social networks want to make it easy for people to find friends. Upscoop just kind of does it all in one place. Oh, and it shows how dumb MySpace has been for being unable to fix their version of this in months.
In response to the first comment, I’m sure it searches by email address, not real name. Email addresses are unique, generally speaking.
a cool idea, the main problem is essentially the way I understand it you are creating a new account/login each time you import your email list from a particular messenger account. For me that would be crazy, because I have so many accounts (used for different bands, different services I perform for clients).
if the company could fix it so you have 1 login and import all your different accounts under that one login it would be cool
I don’t think it’s right to criticize speed at this time: they’ve must have gotten quite a lot of traffic lately, especially after being crunched. Even Google suffers from the impact of launching a service, so we can’t blame them.
I haven’t tried it out yet but I love the idea. I wonder how they manage to find out the account by using the email address.
My first guess is that they attempt to register an account with that email, and if the system gets an error response it assumes that person has and is using an account.
With that method, however, they can’t find a link to the profile or anything. I guess that they also perform an (API?) search if the site allows it for the email address to get the link.
All in all, it seems a fairly CPU / bandwidth intensive process, and it’s really worth the wait, imho.
By the way, an interface change wouldn’t be bad. Instead of only displaying those email providers, an alternative textarea in which you can paste all your emails would dramatically boost both the usability and trust of people in this service.
Gmail doesn’t Working with… has anybody tried this service with Gmail ?
It doesn’t work for me (using Hotmail).
“MySpace does as well, but it’s apparently been broken for months without them bothering to fix it.”
MySpace in general has always been broken without them bothering to fix it.
Nice idea but it’s a bit odd that they haven’t included a possibility to just upload a list of email addresses (what the system uses for identification).
I mean, upscoop is not using the email address I give it (that I claim to be my identity) to verify in any way that I’m not stalker/CIA/Al-Qaeda guy feeding it with a longlist of my possible victims/suspects. It would, of course, be very difficult to verify anything with the information they have.
But the point is that because of this they could simply just allow people to upload a list of email addresses (like LinkedIn did at least some three years ago when it introduced it’s ‘buddy finder’, or whatever they called it).
Another thing, one that I’m slightly worried about, is that will they use theemail addresses for something? Bernadette’s quote on their privacy policy doesn’t rule out that they wouldn’t automatically generate a first reputation entry, a sort of ‘preliminary’ note to Rapleaf database for all of the addresses entered into Upscoop. This possibility crossed my mind because it is something they do to every single email address queried in Rapleaf. See my invented address (rapleaf@mailinator.com) query result at
http://www.rapl...rofile/3220krUD
“This person has an email domain easily created from a free mail service. Buyers and sellers may want to get more identifiable information before engaging in commerce with this person, especially since this person has not yet signed up for a Rapleaf account.”
Posted by Rapleaf on Feb 01, 2007.
This wouldn’t be legally against their privacy policy (unless there’s more stricting clause – didn’t read it) because that isn’t spamming or sharing the email addresses with any *other* company.
Anyone from Rapleaf care to comment?
Grande sito!!
luogo fine, sapete..
Desidero appena dire che e un luogo ben cotto