While we’ve covered the people search sector, and Facebook’s entrance into that sector, we have yet to profile a nascent site called BigSight that seeks to become the go-to web destination for people profiles.
BigSight differs from other people search sites like Wink and Spock by focusing on the creation of a centralized repository of profile information rather than crawling the web to collect personal information from disparate sources. It also differs from resources like Wikipedia by encouraging the creation of profiles for any and everyone, not just people who clear a subjective “prominence” bar.
Profiles on BigSight are created by individuals themselves, as in the case of social networks, and you must sign into the site before you can edit your profile. It’s not an open wiki by any means, and site editors only make minor changes to profiles. Users are encouraged to update their public profiles every quarter, and profiles that go untouched for more than two quarters risk removal from the directory.
The site is fairly simple in its current incarnation. Profiles display a full name, a portrait, an activity/job description, an age, a location, and a third-person description. You can also view a resume (if uploaded), a timeline of the person’s life, a list of associated people, an embeddable BigSight badge, and a contact form. Members of BigSight are organized into groups and work/school associations. To see what I mean, you can view my profile here and members of the American Medical Association here.
BigSight currently has a mere 1,000 users, so its biggest challenge will be to create a critical mass that will drive usage and awareness. To do this, co-founders Dan Birdwhistell and Ben Sinclair have sought to leverage a large repository of private profile information: Facebook. They are actually the creators of a Facebook application we covered called FriendCSV that allows you to export much of your friends’ profile information out to an Excel-ready CSV file. They have also just released an application called Backuper that lets you export not only profile data but the photos you’ve uploaded to Facebook as well, all while syncing email address data from your Gmail account (Facebook’s platform doesn’t allow for the export of contact information).
In an impressive example of how developers can leverage the Facebook platform to get people to an external site, the founders have designed these Facebook apps to automatically set up a basic profile on BigSight with your Facebook profile data. After you run either of these backup programs, you will be notified of the creation of a BigSight profile, which contains a third-person description constructed from the information you gave Facebook. You can see the BigSight profile created from my Facebook profile to the right. Users have the option of deleting this profile or adding additional information to it. If the user simply does nothing with his or her BigSight profile, it will disappear after a few months.
Similarly, if you go to fb.bigsight.org, you can set up a BigSight profile by using your Facebook profile as a starting point and providing missing pieces like an email address. All you need to do is enter your Facebook credentials to pull the data out from Facebook. Birdwhistell says that this usage of Facebook data is completely within Facebook’s terms of service, and he expects many other services with user profiles to begin giving new users option of building their presence starting with their Facebook information.
As a side note, PeekYou - a people search site that aggregates info from around the web - thinks I co-founded this company.
it’s a .org but not a non-profit? Isn’t that slightly confusing?
simplicity rules. i can see bigsight becoming a huge success. i would advise they screen users and spare us from the myspace crowd.
“BigSight Aims to Become White Pages of Web, Pulls Data from Facebook” Alert! customers can save a step and just go to face book?
What’s to stop me from registering as Duncan Riley?
I believe its a violation of the facebook developer agreement to keep data about users for more than 24 hours. wouldn’t creating an external profile about a user without their permission violate that agreement? they must be agreeing to that at some point or I would think facebook would be all over them. anybody know wahts really happening here?
If facebook is this restrictive, people should start moving away from using FB.
are you shitting me? another people search site that does nothing new or interesting? come on…1,000 users! wow! that’s about 2 floors in one office building in one city in one state…never. zoominfo owns this market, period. when zoominfo wakes up and eradicates their nonsensical billing model, they will become the true google of people search. end of story.
note that Spock does do the things listed - central profiling and wanting to cover anyone on the planet. I think Spock’s strategy makes more sense since its a hybrid of user-built and auto-built profiles for maximum information and profile content is there whether or not the person shows up.
Hey Everyone. A few responses:
1. This in no way even comes close to breaking any rules on FB. I’ll say again that if more people would sit down and read the Platform documentation that they’d quickly realize that they can use FB (and its data) to do many more things than one would expect.
2. Dave re: Zoominfo. I wish them the best but they are a dinosaur and the results their searches provide are more than not useless. And the 1,000 users simply means we just came out of beta. Have you signed up yet? It’d be a great way to promote your blog
3. Scott re: Spock. I actually had high expectations for Spock and initially thought that their hybrid strategy of aggregation and internal content build made sense, but I’m not sure they’ll win in the end. What we have are complete profiles that contain great information and link people across meaningful entities (schools, companies, etc.). Our model will take much longer to take to scale, but once it gets there, it should be rock solid.
Let me know if anyone has any more questions.
Dan
Hi Dan, thank you for posting here and for offering to answer further questions.
1) How do I delete/remove/hide my bigsight.org page, which was an unwelcome surprise when I googled my own name?
2) On Aug 20, I received a marketing email from your company. I have never communicated with bigsight.org in any way prior to this. As far as I know, a business must have had a relationship with customers (such as a purchase or an instance of mutual communication) at some point during the previous 18 months, otherwise they may not send any form of direct marketing. What gives your company the legal right to market directly to me via email?
3) When I googled my name and saw the bigsight.org profile that had been constructed for me, I didn’t think it was cool or handy - rather my immediate reaction was to assume that my privacy had been invaded in some way. Although it seems that your organization appears to be operating within the boundaries of the law, this makes me feel alarmed and used - not empowered. Coupled with the fact that there is no “opt out” or “cancel this account” option on your site, I currently have a very negative image of your company as one that forces its service upon people, much like I do when I receive spam email. Judging by my own reaction, I can guess that there will be many more like me, and I have a feeling that there is a lot of overlap between the “hip early adopter crowd who invite friends to join social networks” you may be targeting and the “effusive and reactionary netroots privacy guardian” type crowd. Do you plan any sort of damage control to address such concerns and potential damage to your brand image?
Thanks,
NAF