Spokeo is an interesting site I just found out about. The easiest way to describe Spoke is that it is a friend tracker. How it works is that once you sign up, it looks into your email contact list on Yahoo or Hotmail, and finds out who your friends are. With that, they track all the accounts your friends have on 20 social networks. The networks includes My Space, blogs, Flickr, and YouTube among others.
So, you can see everything your friends have posted online, and you are notified when new items are posted. You can see photos and videos your friends have posted online. You can also see what books they are interested on the Amazon wish list, as well as music they download on Padora. Its kind of interesting, but don’t expect any earth shattering information. I already know what kind of books and music my friends like. And I already know about their blogs. What is interesting are the people on my contact list that I only know casually, or a business associate. When I see their My Space page, or family pictures, I see another side of them that I don’t usually do in a business setting. It helps create a more personal relationship if I know a little more of their personal side. I did find one piece of “shocking” information on an associate of mine, but normally its pretty tame stuff.
It kind of feels like you are snooping since your friends don’t know you are looking at their online postings, but remember everything Spokeo brings up is from public information. You can find all these things about your friends on your own, with some effort, and internet searching, but Spokeo does it all for you. A friend of mine has a concern about privacy when blogging. Services such as Spokeo illustrate the fact that you need to be careful if you post anything online. Once it is online, anyone can see it, and it stays online forever even if you remove it. However, it does not appear any of my friends have anything “incriminating” or even that interesting online.
