Spokeo

Spokeo could easily be renamed as 'Spookio' because it's one of those 'omg' resources. What it does is gathers details on all your friends from your various networks into one easy to find place. I started by adding my Gmail details. It then went off and found a dozen or so contacts which it then displayed for me. I dipped in and looked at the information on one contact. This included:
His Amazon wishlist (2 items, including the Cluetrain manifesto, in case he wants to identify himself!)
His Flickr account
MySpace details (just a photograph)
hi5 profile details
Twitter postings
Pandora details
StumbleUpon lists
Multiply site photographs

Other accounts for different people included digg, Upcoming, Picasa accounts, LinkedIn and a bunch of others besides. And, more than that, it was able to work out who friends are even when they're using different names. One gmail contact that I have goes by 4 different names, depending on if she's on digg, Flickr, MySpace or Twitter. All in all, it was a real eyeopener and not a little spooky, as I say. I didn't much like it, because it felt like I had been invited into a friends house and was poking around in their drawers while they went to make tea. Not something I'll be using on a regular basis, but useful to know it's there I guess.

Comments

[Simon Chamberlain]

Definitely spooky. I don't mind (so much) being able to see what my friends are up to. The problem with this is it equates "friend" with "anyone who has ever emailed me on Gmail". So it includes my real-life friends, my internet acquaintances, and anyone who emailed the support list at a website where I'm an admin. I can't imagine that the last group would be happy about this (I've already found some people's real names and jobs, etc).

This is somewhat scary.

[Hazel Edmunds]

Simon has it wrong. It isn't "somewhat" scary it's "really, horribly, frighteningly" scary.

[Jez Pickering]

I'm a user of Live Journal. Someone made reference to Spokeo and suggested we all go there and hand over our password and take a look at how it worked. That made me angry - what a dumb suggestion. I didn't visit the site, but made a public post saying that I thought handing an email password to ANYONE was pretty dumb. Within an hour of me posting, a Spokeo representative had left comments in both my Live Journal and my Facebook account. (How they trawled my post up so quickly is the first eye-opener). The comment basically encouraged my to make a .csv copy of my OUTLOOK address book and upload it to their site! I don't need to tell you that an Outlook address book can contain real names, addresses and telephone numbers. I can only speculate as to why they were so interested in getting that kind of information. My LJ and Facebook accounts have been deleted, and I've changed my hotmail account. The owners of Spokeo are on some kind of mission - and they're going to great lengths to accomplish it.