PeekYou is a fairly new site that competes in a growingly crowded people search space.
The site offers the standard features we’ve come to expect from people focused search sites. A general user profile includes tags, which are divided into three categories (life, work and school) for context, web links including social network profiles, bio and picture.
PeekYou was founded by Michael Hussey, the creator of sites including RateMyTeachers.com which were later acquired to MTV. Hussey sees PeekYou as being “the ultimate reindexing of the web and a virtual people pages, spanning the entire web and assigning unique identities to individuals made up of everything from Social Networking pages, blog posts, news stories and known online aliases.” OK, so that is a handful, but he is at least aiming high. The site launched in July 2007.
PeekYou competes directly with Spock and in some respect with Wink as well (see our Spock coverage here, others here), so a direct comparison is called for. I like PeekYou in some ways more than Spock. It could be the aesthetics: PeekYou is much nicer to look at and seems to play more nicely as well in terms of editing, where as Spock may provide better links due to its higher user numbers, but it just doesn’t look nearly as nice. The data in PeekYou, at least for the couple of people I checked, also seems to be more accessible (for now). For example, comparing Michael Arrington on PeekYou and Spock (here and here) you get an immediate idea on what Michael is about in PeekYou, where as in Spock there may be more tags and relationships, but they are partially buried and not always immediately clear in terms of context. All up, Spock may be getting all the attention, but PeekYou does offer a decent alternative.
What a strange name for a company!
Mashable ran a post comparing a couple more social search tools, this space is heating up; mashable.com/2007/07/18/people-search/
We are behind Explode (http://ex.plode.us) and have just launched a Facebook app for it which brings social search to Facebook users. Those interested can find out more here: http://curverid...k-with-explode/
Hmm, can’t seem to register – a problem with Macs, pehaps…?
50+M profiles it says at the top, damn that sounds like alot !
robram
I only accessed via a Mac, and using Safari as well
I like PeekYou a lot more than Spock. I guess it’s just a preference thing.
@bankblast: 50+M profiles online. It doesn’t say that they’re all PeekYou
. It’s funny how these sites pop up and generate such large communities so rapidly. It’s like no one wants to be left out of the one that turns into Stephenson’s Metaverse.
“@bankblast: 50+M profiles online. It doesn’t say that they’re all PeekYou
. It’s funny how these sites pop up and generate such large communities so rapidly. It’s like no one wants to be left out of the one that turns into Stephenson’s Metaverse.”
And you thought that sites like that will open with 10 profiles ??? Ofcourse they collect data first ….
I looked up some obscure friends of mine on both and Spock had them while Peek You didn’t. PeekYou also didn’t have much info about me, even though there’s stuff all over the Internet. It doesn’t seem to gather information the way Spock does. Also, I had a real problem (using Firefox) trying to add a photo from my own computer. Perhaps it was the Mac and the browser, but I didn’t like Peek You at all.
The real question is how do these sites get their data? Did they buy it? Did they steel it?
Call it a preference but I would rather use spock as they generate results as opposed to peekyou wich is crap with a nice rapper.
The real question is how do these sites get their data? Did they buy it? Did they steel it?
Call it a preference but I would rather use spock as they generate results as opposed to peekyou wich is crap with a nice rapper.
What are you talking about?? Spock only spiders Wikipedia, LinkedIn, and MySpace. PeekYou gathers info from many more sites than that. They have multiple profiles for the same person, and millions of dead famous people too. That’s how they make up their 100+ million profiles. Look at this http://spock.co...Llewelyn-Davies What a poor excuse of a profile!! A living actress’ mugshot on the profile of a dead 18th century nobody. Way to prop up the numbers.
It is SPOCK that gathers data illicitly. They tag people as pedophiles and rapists, gather tags using fake Facebook applications which users never gave any consent for, and they don’t let you directly edit your information, including slanderous tags, like you can on PeekYou.
Grapple sounds like he’s a Spock intern, using Spock’s classic libel-style of handling users and competitors.
looks like peekyou has a faster site. You would think with all the money spock raised they could optimize their hosting.
Well actually it was PeekYou that could find me and most of my obscure friends, not Spock. At this stage, however, I don’t think the depth of data is the real indicator.
If you judge only by the structure and layout of the site, PeekYou is much more inviting. The design is simply a cut above Spock and Wink’s. The organization of their data is also more helpful. You can narrow people down by location in a very systematic way, whereas while Spock has more people listed, a lot of them are impossible to find, with “Greater New York area” etc for a location, instead of a Country/State/City base which is easy to hierarchically navigate.
Spock has too many tags. Many weird and unintuitive ones, that sound like sentence fragments. While this gives users the ability to search by many keyword combinations, for any given query you get hundreds of thousands of results, making it virtually impossible to find who you’re looking for. And their Advanced Search features simply blow. To weed out all their stupid and irrelevant tags people would have to spend their lives voting them down. No one will bother
On PeekYou’s FAQ they say they limit their tag number to 25. They also divide them by category life/work/school for greater semantic navigation. PeekYou also lets you edit tags directly, even delete them, so if they are too long winded or stupid, you can clean them up in a second.
I also like how PeekYou categorizes links, instead of throwing them on the wall like Spock does, and it lets you delete bad/broken links directly, or edit incorrect URLs, and most importantly, enter descriptions for the links so people know what to expect, or have even an introduction to that person without clicking on any of the links, just from their descriptions. Spock is so far behind in all those features. Not a user-friendly site.
PeekYou is a definite winner as far as I can see. Sounds like Spock blew all their money in PR so we can hear about them, while sites like PeekYou got busy actually building great features and applications.
Well actually Spock is down now completely. What a useless site! I agree with Cat Eyes. PeekYou rocks!
Spock, peekyou, whatever. Yay – crawling the socialnets. MOAR NETS! Can someone explain what the demand for this technology is, beyond a fitful spike of ego searches?
As usual, peekyou is unable to find me, even though I run a standard wordpress blog with a nice about page. So — why would I go here instead of Facebook or Linked In?
Try Wink – I’ve found it to be the easiest and most intuitive way to find people. Who cares about celebrity profiles…I can google them. Id rather just see what my friends are up to. Wink works wonders when you register and create your own profile.