So how many social networks do you belong too? Two? Five?
More?
Chances are there are wrinkles and differences to the personal information you
provide on each — say, MySpace versus LinkedIn. A Silicon Valley startup
collects information from public data on more than 30 social networking sites,
including Flickr, LinkedIn, MySpace, StumbleUpon, Windows Live Spaces and
YouTube. With a Spokeo account you can add friends, or anyone else for that
matter, by email or their profile URL, and the site collects their information
from the social networks they belong to.
Each time you log in to Spokeo you’ll
get a summary of changes made by your friends, or any other folks your tracking, at these sites. Spokeo calls its
service, which only collects information that is public on these sites, a
“Friend Tracker.”
A blog entry by Spokeo’s founder Harrison, begins:
“Whenever I introduce Spokeo to my friends, their first reactions are
always “Wow!”, then “Hm … this is a little scary”, then
“This is freaking cool!”.