We’re not sure when it launched, but Fred Wilson has discovered that Seth Godin’s Squidoo has quietly entered the people search field with a new product called Squidwho.
Squidwho provides similar features to competitors including Wink, Spock, PeekYou, WikiYou and Zoominfo. Pages include a short biography, Amazon products (where applicable), YouTube videos, Flickr shots, latest news and RSS feed data from appropriate sites.
Each page is maintained my Squidoo Lens Guide and offers the same revenue share model as regular Squidoo pages offer.
It would be easy to question yet another company targeting people search in what continues to be a hot vertical (even Facebook is now offering public people search), and yet by labelling Squidoo Lens’ under the Squidwho label it’s a logical step for Squidoo. The backend is already in place as are the would-be guides to create the information; in effect the new service is more branding exercise than something completely new.
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Hmmm, I wonder if anyone ever uses such sites. No i guess :S
Well, considering Google blocked Squidoo, it does negatively impact on it. I have been a long time Squidoo user, and it does help to have somewhere to go to with links and simple, down-to-earth explanations about things. But yeah, there were people who were already making lenses about celebrities and such
Yet another people search engine to use exactly for what after the novelty wears off fast.
What’s their business model and how do they make money?
@km4: Ads
You know guys should worry about Privacy right. The U.S. consitution rights say that no companies is allow to seize information without premission, based on 4th Amendment. Now, Invasion privacy can do harm to people’s lives.
Some day… I hope the U.S supreme court order companies to remove U.S citizen data online, address online, SS#, medical records online. I hope they do the right thing.
Online transactions have to take place. For some people, it’s a lifesaver (people with disabilities, work double, maybe triple shifts) so yeah, there should be more privacy, but you shouldn’t get rid of it all.
Seth talks about it here: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/s.....a-who.html on August 29.
One big disadvantage of Squidwho is that it doesn’t separate information about different people with the same name, which I believe is the true advantage of Spock over Google.
SquidWho went “live” a couple of weeks ago. Nicely done.
I hope it results in less spam than Squidoo.
So, what’s the most killer application for Squidwho or Spock? I find them interesting and have experimented quite a bit with Spoke, but I’m still struggling to find how people search is what’s going to make these guys huge. Lately I’ve been on this bandwagon about how social networks are becoming beacons for showcasing and reinforcing an aggregated online brand. Is this an immediate benefit for these sites?
Spuds
I did note that Squidwho launched quietly and we didn’t know when. Makes me wonder though why it wasn’t announced more prominently.
People search is not important! What people want is the ability to use their mission critical applications in the cloud, being able to use whatever whereever, not locate people they don’t even like.
http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com
Duncan, it was actually being tested when a Squidoo user came across it (I don’t know how exactly) The user posted about it on the SquidU forum and it just took off.
I don’t think they were quite ready to make an announcement at the time but the Squidoo users latched onto it so quickly, maybe they decided a big push wasn’t needed.
I created a personal SquidWho page for myself and it’s showing up right underneath my LinkedIn content on Google. The SquidWho page allows me to add far more detail about myself than any of my Social network pages or my LinkedIn profile.
In fact I use my SquidWho page as my blog profile on each of my blogs. It is just a new way of leveraging the Squidoo platform to get content on the web — people who can’t get included in Wikipedia for instance.
Not much different from a normal lens
http://www.orbistrad.com
12 Languages. Translations.
Seth did announce SquidWho on his blog not too long ago:
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/s.....a-who.html
I had a more interesting time reading the comments than I was about the story. Like a comment before me - How do they make money, better yet- how do I make money?
Sorry you guys didn’t hear about this sooner! It was officially released on August 29th with announcements on and off-site. You can read more with some Q&As here: http://www.squidu.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=6952
Since then we’ve added over 6500 lenses on people and characters, famous and not.
I have know about this for quite a while. He announced it on his blog. I created a page for myself as well. It seems like a front-end interface for normal Squidoo lenses.
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