Spokeo 2.0: A Feed Reader For Your Friends
Erick Schonfeld
71 comments »
One of the most addictive features of Facebook is its “News Feed” that keeps you up to date on every inane action any one of your friends has taken on the social network (and some partner sites via Beacon). But what if you want to keep track of what all your friends are doing on other parts of the Web, whether they just added a photo to Flickr, a bookmark to Digg, a product to their Amazon wish list, or sent out a new Twitter?
There are so many social sites out there that it is hard to keep track of them all. Harrison Tang, the founder of Spokeo, just made it easier with the relaunch of his site today.
Spokeo 2.0 is like a blog reader for all of your friends’ activities across more than 30 social Websites, including Bebo, Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Hi5, imeem, Last.fm, LinkedIn, MySpace, Pandora, Slide, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Windows Live Spaces, Yelp, and YouTube. (Delicious is conspicuously absent). Similar to FriendFeed, it presents the latest actions on the Web from your friends as a continually updating stream. It is like a blog reader for what your friends are up to. (It also happens to be regular RSS reader).
What makes Spokeo compelling, at least initially, is that it is dead-simple to set up. In one fell swoop Spokeo can ingest all of your contacts from Gmail, Yahoo, or Hotmail, and then go out to the 30+ sites it monitors and bring back any new content from people in your address book. I tried this with my Gmail account, and it built up a friend reader with more than 500 contacts in less than three minutes. Before, this was a laborious process on Spokeo. You had to add each friend’s blog or feed one by one. (In comparison, FriendFeed lets you suck in your Facebook friends, but only the ones who are also FriendFeed users—plus each member must specify which sites he wants to expose to others.
It is pretty surprising to find out what people (who you think you know) are listening to on Pandora or Twittering about. 
It feels a lot like spying on your friends. The best part is that they don’t ever have to know you are keeping track of them. Spokeo is not trying to build another social network. It is trying to help you keep track of the zillion social sites you already belong to. In fact, notes Tang with pride:
We’ve ripped out any sharing, commenting, or messaging feature that would make us resemble another social network. Spokeo is strictly positioned as a reader for your friends’ updates.
When you join Spokeo, you see all your friends’ updates from different services right away. There is no network for you to build, even if you want to. There is no friend request to send; in fact, your friends don’t even know you are following them.
If this rings privacy alarms, Tang notes:
We only access publicly available information on the Internet, so we don’t know anything that you don’t have access to. For example, Flickr has a feature that allows users to search for their friends by email. Spokeo simply calls that Flickr API. Blogger does not support that feature, so Spokeo cannot find your friends on Blogger.
The contact ingestion feature alone is going to be enough to get lots of people to try this out. Whether they keep coming back, though, is another issue. At least with my Spokeo home page, the friend stream tends to be dominated by Twitters. Those can get annoying. Also, I don’t want to keep track of every single person who has emailed me on Gmail, which automatically adds everyone as a contact. Spokeo lets you delete names and group people together, but that creates another management problem in and of itself. (I know, I’m lazy).
Spokeo’s appeal depends entirely upon how interesting your friends and contacts are, and whether they are so prolific across the Web that it is not possible to keep track of them on one major site like Facebook or Twitter alone. But then, everyone has different interests and will gravitate towards different Web services. Spokeo extends the feed reader metaphor to your friends activities—something I expect we will be seeing a lot more of in the near future. (Spokeo has only raised a small seed round from friends and family. Guy Kawasaki is an adviser to the startup).
Here is what my Spokeo home page looks like:
If you click on someone’s name, like Michael Arrington, you see just their stream:
what if I use a particular email address as my log-in for those different sites, but it’s not the same as the one you have for me in your address book?
A Fad reader! WOW! We really needed this!
sheesh!
virb.com/balm/
This is pretty interesting. I personally prefer not to be so plugged in. However, if you do, this service seems to work pretty well.
I especially like Spokeo’s rigid stance on not becoming another social network. There are far too many already. Where are you, OpenID and FOAF?
This seems like such a productive tool.
It can be useful, but hire a designer for the UI, too much blue!
Remember let the designer be the designer.
I like blue!
Blue is nice, but not so much
The design looks very cheery and lively! Lots of personality but not cluttered at all!
These features aren’t new. Spokeo upgraded at the end of October.
http://www.louisgray.com/live/.....acker.html
They announced the updates here:
http://blog.spokeo.com/?p=105
wow. Sounds interesting, but productive? I doubt it, how productive it is to know what ur contacts are doing. And I personally would like to stay out of the sites, because I don’t want to be watched.
Either way, i think the site is far more useful (although not from my perspective) than a lot of other web 2.0 sites.
System busy. Please try again soon.
-.- And I so wanted to test this :/
Yeah, got the same system busy message, “Spokeo’s too hot right now!”
Really want to see what this is all about
(1) “Awesome. Let me try this out now!”
(2) http://www.spokeo.com
(3) *Join*
(4) “Come back later. Sorry. We can’t take you now.”
Uhh, OK. Guess not. :-/
awsome, but says too busy for me also.
Dear Christop, Jim, Steve, CAR, and 300+ other people so far,
I am sorry that you guys cannot try out Spokeo at the moment. All our servers are at full capacity right now, and we simply cannot keep up the Techcrunch Effect.
Spokeo searches across the Web for stuff your friends share publicly. When we say “across the Web”, we mean just that! Imagine how many friends you got in your address book. Then imagine how many web pages we have to access to find each friend. Multiply the two numbers together, pack all these computations within 30 seconds. Now you can see why we cannot keep up the influx of users from Techcrunch.
Please try back in couple hours after the Techcrunch spike. Thank you for your patience and understanding.
Who in their right mind participates in more than three of those websites? Honestly.
Cool website, though.
“We only access publicly available information on the Internet, so we don’t know anything that you don’t have access to.”
Sure, but putting it all in one place is going to have some privacy advocates in a huff. So really, you know what I am doing without my permission. Smells like facebook beacon without the privacy controls ……
Hi Harrison,
what is your business model?
I’ve heard that there is something like this that you can actually install on your own server, and which is open source. Does anyone know about this? I can’t find it.
I definitely like the idea but not sure if can become popular as a destination site. Does anyone know how FriendFeed is doing?
Does anyone know if something like this exists for unifying different communication streams? Ie, like a unified messaging platform that aggregates all your messages from various social sites into one simple web-based UI? With all the multiplication of social site there are more increasingly more ways of communicating. it might be very usefull to have a way of aggregating them all together.
I guess I am lucky enough to get into Spokeo
I have to say this is one of the most amazing Web 2.0 sites out there.
It’s nothing like Friendfeed even though it sounds like it. Spokeo actually finds all your friends right after you click the “register” button. You don’t have to do anything else.
“Blue is nice, but not so much”
I Agree
My guess is that all those people are rushing to Spokeo to find out what the rest of the world already knows about them.
Just got in. And wow, I just found like four hundred friends.
“Who in their right mind participates in more than three of those websites? Honestly.”
John, it doesn’t matter whether you participate in one or ten or none of those websites. Spokeo is about finding your friends, and you got to have friends using the Internet.
Business model?
I bet it’s ads
Ooooowweeeee!!! How exciting! I’ll give it my best shot.
News feeds from friends are picking up steam, thanks to services like Twitter, Tumblr and of course, services like Spokeo. But if it hasn’t happened already, these updates too will eventually add to information overload. I’ve attempted to create basic time-slices for Spokeo, Twitter, Tumblr (or any other RSS feed) with a content-timing service called WhenGuard (http://whenguard.com). Here, you can provide an RSS feed URL and start and end times that you want to track it. WhenGuard gives you a special URL–known as a jitlink–which will start passing through updates from the RSS URL it aliases at the specified start time and expire after the specified end time.
You can stick jitlinks in your RSS reader and follow interesting people only for the time that they are interesting. Want to see what Robert Scoble has to say, but only for the duration of the next Web20 conference? Create a WhenGuard jitlink around his Twitter feed around the right start and expiration dates and there you have it. Marry this jitlink to a perpetually caching RSS reader like Google Reader and you have a TiVo equivalent for RSS. See http://whenguard.com/faq#rss for more info.
WhenGuard works not just for RSS content, but for any content that has a URL. Feedback is welcomed, as the service is still in its very early stages.
I love giving my email login/password and all of my contacts to new startups! Does anyone know of any other startups that I can give all of my contacts to? Are there any startups accepting social security numbers?
Well, Im off to mint.com to give them my banking info!
personal info is a dozen a cent now. I don’t why it is just a big deal of losing 20mil ppl’s info in the UK. such a baby over there.
“We only access publicly available information on the Internet”
With so many sites finally recognizing the need to offer users meaningful privacy controls, how will a tool that only finds publicly available content ultimately prove to be useful?
this is a great way to keep track of my teenager.
sincerely,
angela hayden
art goddess
Until the teenager invokes every privacy control option available in the sites he/she frequents
Interesting, this is another approach to what Facebook’s trying with the news feed… Facebook apps can now publish feed items to non-app users, so essentially if all my FB friends who are on flickr add a flickr app, all the del.icio.us users add a del.icio.us app, and so on, then Spokeo doesn’t add anything. Just remains to be seen how popular FB apps become.
I don’t know about all of you, but I’m going to the Bahamas for like $75 for a week.
Stick that in your feed reader. =^)
http://cgi.ebay.com/Bahamas-Be.....dZViewItem
The homepage claim seems almost impossible to meet. Guaranteed to find all your friends photos? My friends use dozens of different email addresses, and many services don’t identify users by their email addresses (i.e., you can’t identify my Tumblr blog from my email address). I’m interested in how they’ll solve this.
A couple months ago I started working on a system to address this fracture for myself, and in the last month’s free time expanded it into a general system: http://www.reintegrate.us/. The pages hosted on reintegrate aren’t identifiable by email address, so Spokeo couldn’t find a person’s reintegrate.us page by their email address, but maybe this is a feature that systems should begin supporting. http://friendfinder.reintegrat.....xample.com to return either 404 or 301 => http://www.reintegrate.us/someone.
now my ex-boss who I just sent an email to yesterday knows I bought a box of 50$ condoms from walmart.com… and the girl I am chasing knows about it too, what should I do? Should I refund it online then go there and pick them up myself now? will refund shows up?
Whats wrong with buying condoms? =)
they are 50 cents each, i told my ex boss i used 50$ ones.
and i told the girl i like I am still a virgin~
It shouldn’t really log your condom purchase….should it? Well I just started using it….and boy I feel betrayed that some of my friends never told me they had accounts on a few sites out there :’( Woe is me
Well it just shows how beautifully the internet can enforce truthfulness
I prefer the term truthyness
EW, if your ex-boss knows those things about you, he definitely did NOT use Spokeo to find it out
Spokeo’s power does not lie in the fact that we can dig out stuffs that you don’t have access to. We can’t. Spokeo is useful because there are so many websites and so much content from your friends out there, without Spokeo, you’ll never notice their existence.
After all, you are not going to 30+ websites everyday just to see if your friends have posted new things. Are you?
Indeed. Just found out a friend is on Imeem and another on Slide….and one had pictures they had not shared with me :’( The devastating power of da intarweb
I have to try this. This looks good.
Gah. Keeps showing up the same updates over and over.
I think this sounds great, and obviously better than the limitations of Facebook, but for some reason, I still won’t try it. I’m 22 years old and until I see a significant portion of my friends using it, I won’t even consider it no matter how much better it is. Someone needs to think of a reason why this happens.
Jason: This is to track your friends on other networks. This isn’t a network itself…
Very interesting stuff… /ac.
Sounds good, didnt work when i tried to sign up so i was wondering…
Plaxo Plus has a feature where you can hook up feeds from social sites, Spokeo does the same thing rite?
n locamigos.com lets you search for your friends who are already on these social sites…
Is Spokeo in between these two?
Hell, even a day later you still can’t sign up. I’d like to check it out, but honestly if I can’t get in now I’ll most likely end up forgetting about it.
..so when will you start to track all user behaviour not just social networks? it souds like the framework is already in place, you just need turn the ‘big brotha’ switch on..
Jason and Kee, sorry about the wait. We are not trying to artificially limit registrations. The message is an automatic message from our system, indicating that it cannot take any more work.
It was originally intended as some sort of error message. I guess it has becomes the “norm” now since 5000+ people have already seen that page.
Our system has been running at 100% capacity every single minute since the Techcrunch story. Every time the system dips to 90%, new users will sign up and fill up the queue within minutes. Please be patient. The traffic spike should calm down after a few days.
“I’ve heard that there is something like this that you can actually install on your own server, and which is open source.”
@borge:
Maybe you mean NoseRub by Dirk Olbertz. It’s open source and you can install it on your own server.
ViolettVerq: Thanks a lot! That is exactly what I was looking for!
I think I like my friends too much to do this to them.
Haha. Cool. Glad that I could help you, Børge.
I’m currently using it as a user on Identoo.com, but my boyfriend also installed it on his own server. I love the fact that you can also use it from outside and don’t need an account to see the social stream.
Greets from Germany to Norway!
You can change the color scheme in your account settings if the blue is making you sick. They have 6 theme options. Personally, I don’t think it’s that overwhelming, but blue is my favorite color.
This site is absolutely amazing!
5 days later, and it still doesn’t work.
Curious about the name? Rather close to Spoke.com, especially since both are valley companies.
Seems like a great aggregator of social sites…