February 6, 2008

150 Invites To 123people.com For TechCrunch Readers

Duncan Riley

21 comments »

New comer to the people search game 123people.com is a Austrian based startup that is looking to provide a new take on the competitive people search market with a European focus.

There’s no shortage of wannabes in this space. Spock, Wink, Zoominfo, WikiYou and PeekYou are a few companies we’ve reviewed previously. 123people.com joins that list, but there are a few differences that are worth mentioning.

123people.com is primarily a data aggregator, but unlike some of its competitors it goes one step further by aggregating publicly available phone numbers and email addresses for every search result. It’s not perfect, and it has better results for European focused searches, but this will improve with time.

In addition 123people also aggregates videos, photos, tags and comments from “hundreds of international sites” including Facebook, Hi5, Xing, YouTube, Last.fm and studiVZ. Users can claim, tag, vote and comment on aggregated profiles on 123people.com.

We have invites to the private beta of 123people.com to give away to TechCrunch readers. The first 150 people to email privatebeta@123people.com will get an invite code in return, and if you are one of the 150, let us know what you think of 123people.com in the comments.

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123People « SocialWeb

March 31st, 2008 at 2:05 am

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ripple024

February 6th, 2008 at 5:50 am

no invite yet. =(
OnkelSchark

February 6th, 2008 at 5:56 am

Email sent, waiting patiently.
Steffen Ruehl

February 6th, 2008 at 6:16 am

Techcrunch missed first European search engine yasni.de in this list and in history …
courtney benson

February 6th, 2008 at 7:24 am

Sounds like a dream opportunity for spammers and telemarketers. The idea of getting someone’s email address and phone number without permission is disturbing. Europe’s privacy laws are suppose to prevent this sort of thing.
Live Crunch

February 6th, 2008 at 8:02 am

Honestly? Don’t like it….yet another……
Zoli Erdos

February 6th, 2008 at 8:20 am

150? Why not 123?
Lizi

February 6th, 2008 at 8:21 am

123people.com and other existing people search engines are greate if you want to find specific person.
The drawback , the user must know the name or the email of the desired person in advance, which is not suitable for dating proposes or when the user just wants to meet new friends with similar interests.

http://www.copenda.com is a new social people search engine with a totally different approach to people search.
You type your preferences such as : location,age,hobies,hight, etc. …and Copenda will find the match, your next match can be from popular social networks and dating sites such as Myspace, Facebook, hi5, friendster, match, plentyoffish and more.
Paul

February 6th, 2008 at 8:34 am

150 people invited to give personal information to a little-known company whose premise is undermining their privacy? What a gift. They’ve offered us a thimble to help dig our own graves.
AnonTroll

February 6th, 2008 at 9:45 am

I’m just not searching for specific people that don’t show up on google enough to care about this.
TechGuy

February 6th, 2008 at 10:18 am

My favorite people search engine by far is ManagedQ. They have an Executive Summary feature that shows you all the associated People, Places and Things for a given person. And it’s not human edited, it uses an NLP algorithm to extract the info in real-time.

Take a look at Michael Arrington on ManagedQ
OnkelSchark

February 6th, 2008 at 12:49 pm

mmm… hours later, still no invite.

So I tried signing up straight on their site (where it says nothing about a private beta), submitted step 1 of 4 and got:

“We are upgrading the systems/ Wir verbessern die Systeme”

Looks like you’re off to a great start 123people, great start…
Mark

February 6th, 2008 at 12:55 pm

Who would need this kind of service? Stalkers? Private eyes? What is the target group? Grannies next door? Surely you wouldn’t want someone who found about you like this to contact you… Jackals are everywhere nowadays, all the more reason to cover your abdominal area.
Mark

February 6th, 2008 at 12:57 pm

Oh yeah, and managedq looked like google results packed web 2.0 style… thank god.
stefanos1990

February 7th, 2008 at 1:09 am

I’ve got an invite, logged on, but it sucks. I can’t find anyone, although all those people can be found on google. First I tried looking for my friends, not a single hit. Then I searched Gordon Brown, it said 77 results, but they didn’t show, all there was on the screen was this:

Retrieving more results…
Popular Searches
Dietrich Mateschitz
Anna Netrebko
Markus Rogan
Retrieving more results…

and it stayed that way for 10 minutes
Joke Cricket

February 7th, 2008 at 1:32 am

I got the invite..but this site is not good..some times giving errors.
Amanda

February 7th, 2008 at 1:33 am

Thank you for all of your interest in 123people.com. We’ve sent out 150 invites to the first people who responded and will make more available in the coming weeks.

I also appreciate your comments about privacy. 123people.com only aggregates information that is already publicly available on the Web. Any registered user can easily adjust privacy settings, decide what information is or is not displayed and determine how much of his or her personal data is open for editing by other users.

As you test out the beta site, remember that results are currently optimized for European Web users so you will not have the full search experience if you are testing from the US.

We’ll launch the US release soon and wanted to involve you in testing out the site as early in its development as possible.

If you have any questions, concerns or feedback you can email me directly or any member the 123people.com team.

Amanda
i5invest
a [dot] mooney at i5invest [dot] com
Stefan

February 7th, 2008 at 2:26 am

Hi,
I am the co-founder of 123people.com. As Amanda said, thank you for all of your interest in the site. We will try to provide all of you access to the beta site soon.

@stefanos1990: Sorry to hear you’re having some technical issues. What browser are you using to access the site? I assume you’re working in Firefox or IE as we’re currently working through some issues with Safari and other browsers. Our technical team is working on this and will keep you posted.

We’re glad to have you involved so early in the development of the site.

Stefan, co-founder 123people.com
Feedback (at) 123people.com
Stefan

February 7th, 2008 at 2:30 am

@stefanos1990: of course, I meant “assume you’re NOT working in Firefox or IE”

Stefan, co-founder 123people.com
Simos

February 7th, 2008 at 5:07 am

@Stefan - I get the same issue as Stefanos1990 with every browser on my PC. I have tried with IE7, Mozilla and Safari. None of the seem to work as I cannot see the search results.

Given that it’s the main function of the site (searching for people) it’s quite disappointing the search results cannot be displayed!

Also, I have not found a way of unsubscribing myself - is there such a feature? And worryingly the ‘medium’ and ‘high’ privacy settings are not yet available…

Sorry to be negative Stefan but as it was featured in Techcrunch I was expecting that at least the search part would work fine (even with limited results). Having said that, strange browser-related problems (I am assuming it is as I’m sure you’ve tried the search in IE and Mozilla yourself!!!) are getting tougher and tougher to catch!
Stefan

February 7th, 2008 at 8:27 am

@Simos: Thanks for your feedback. We are unable to reproduce your issue. Do you have javascript deactivated? Would be grateful if you contact us directly at feedback (at) 123people.com

Stefan, co-founder 123people.com