People — especially young people — are spending more time online, and they’re developing loyalties to certain social networking sites.
Many young people have profiles and friends at multiple sites (Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, etc), and it takes effort to keep click through friends’ profiles to see what they’re up to. Spokeo is a new Mountain View start-up that tries to solve that problem.
It is another one of those things that seems so obvious, and helpful: It gives you a way to import, into one page, all of the postings your friends have made at about 20 popular social networking sites. In other words, it combines Facebook, MySpace, Flickr and all the others into one.
See image below. Our left arrow shows where the user has imported all their buddies from the other sites listed on the sidebar. These are imported by pressing an “add” button (a menu lets you pick which site to go to, and then which buddies to import). The right arrow points to the main area where the posts scroll from the other sites, from the user’s buddies.
It also offers a “recommendation” feature. If your friend wants to recommend something they see, they push a recommend button, and the item shows up on your page — even if the source of recommended post wasn’t from one of your direct friends. Higher on the sidebar is a control panel, where you can do things like toggle between your own profiles (”Me”) and those of your friends.
There are a few bugs. We clicked on some of the content, and it appeared MySpace and YouTube were blocking access to some of the content. Also, there are some bugs when creating and pulling in your own profile from some of these sites. But it is early days, and the idea is a good one. And its not like these sites being pulled from will be bending over backward to help. We’ve written before about how MySpace, in particular, has tried to block efforts to draw attention from its site.
Ray Chen, a Stanford student, and two roommates, launched a testing version of the site in April. At the time, they raised an angel round from undisclosed investors in the “low hundreds of thousands.” They officially launched two weeks ago.
They are now six engineers and are looking to hire their first business development person, Chen told us earlier Wednesday. They’re crammed in a 600 sq foot office on Shoreline, enough space for the six people and three plants.
It plans to make money from advertising, but hasn’t started yet.
Tags: co:Facebook, co:flickr, co:MySpace, co:Spokeo4 Comments
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Harrison Tang said:
Thanks, Matt, for your mention. This is actually our first Web project after college, so we know that we still have a lot to learn. Your critique is very helpful and much appreciated.
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evbart said:
An aggregator for social networks is a great idea. Having friends in different networks scattered across multiple sites is really a pain, and being forced to use MySpace’s UI is equally painful.
I wonder if facebook could benefit from pulling off of myspace. Those are the big two, and this would solve my problem.
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Trakkor said:
I checked the site and was unable to find Facebook aggregation anywhere. I think you mistook it for Facebox.
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Bob said:
“It plans to make money from advertising, but hasn’t started yet.” And when that fails, they will simply move into “email marketing” because they will have collected millions of VALID and verified email addresses.
Go away, Spokeo. I don’t want your services. As soon as I got spammed by them listing my account names, I looked for a way to opt out of their “service” - there seems to be none. I changed my privacy settings on all of the sites. Yay Spokeo! Promote ’social networking’ by spamming people! Not all of us want to be “aggregated” you know.
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Spokeo is red hot « Technically Speaking said:
[...] Spokeo, again has picked up some more nice press. That now is two high profiled tech sites in the past 24 hours? Very nice, and I’m sure glad I was ahead of the pack on this site. Some people don’t like it, but I still stand by my original post which was back on 11/18. [...]
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VentureBeat » VentureBeat’s high-end jobs said:
[...] –Perenety, a start-up that is about to relaunch, is looking for a software engineer; –Sling Media is looking for a director of worldwide customer and technical support; –Kosmix, the search company run by the guys who went to school with the Google guys, are looking for an interaction/visual designer; –Yelp, the online local review company, is looking for a senior system administrator; –Spokeo, the new company we wrote about integrating MySpace, YouTube, Flickr and others, is looking for two Ruby developers; –Jigsaw, the start-up that says it is giving Hoover’s a run for its money, is hiring Web developers, software engineers, senior product managers and more. Tagged $100000 plus, jobs, venturebeat jobboard VentureBeat Community [...]