Spokeo Blog | Find People through People Search

We’ve just released our new email research tool.  This new tool pilots Spokeo 3.0 people search capabilities, which include an improved user interface, more powerful username heuristics, business-information aggregation, faster performance, and more.  We will deploy this new search tool to all our users in the coming weeks.  Please stay tuned as we roll out all the exciting 3.0 features this summer!

The new Spokeo people search is coming in three weeks.  We’ve been working on the Spokeo 3.0 for couple months already, and now we are finally ready to release the first wave of new changes.  The above is an exclusive preview of the new Spokeo search interface.  As you can see, Spokeo search will now focus on finding the most comprehensive profile of the person; whereas, Spokeo reading list will remain focused on tracking friends’ updates. 

Underneath this brand new look, the new Spokeo search will now be able to discover and aggregate business-related information.  Prior to this upcoming 3.0 release, Spokeo is known for finding people’s social information across various social networks, photo albums, music sites, and other user-generated-content services.  In the next couple weeks, Spokeo will start aggregating other types of content to introduce new perspectives on people searches.  Hopefully you will find Spokeo even more indispensable for your day-to-day research.

Spokeo.com was down from 1:30am to approximately 7:00am this Saturday morning because our colocation center experienced an unexpected power outage.  All the system is now back up, but we are still working on the kinks to make sure nothing goes wrong.  If you found any unexpected bug, please contact us right away.

This morning, we officially ended our support for themes and skins.  We first introduced the theme / personalization feature on August 27, 2007, and we had been slowly adding new designs over the last one and a half years.  Below are the first two themes that we launched with the Spokeo 2.0 release:

Themes are popular among our hard-core users; however, maintaining various themes and compatibilities has been slowing down our new technical development.  We at Spokeo like to think outside of the box, and we would like to build disruptive technologies.  Restricting ourselves to old themes hinder our ability to build something amazing for the upcoming Spokeo 3.0 release.  After a lengthy debate, we’ve made the painful decision to retire all the old themes.

This is by no means an easy decision.  After all, we have devoted a lot of times and resources to come up and support these wonderful designs over the years.  That said, we got some very interesting new features coming up (you should be able to start noticing some changes in the design details), and it is time to move on.

For the past year, we have been focusing on scaling and increasing Spokeo’s back-end performance.  These technical improvements definitely don’t sound or look sexy since normal users cannot tell if anything has been changed.  However, these works are required for accommodating the increasing amount of new users.  The fact that Spokeo still runs very fast while we are signing up thousands of new users more a day is not an easy feat.

Now we have more or less stabilized our back-end architecture; we have the time and resources to revisit our front-end user interface design.  While the existing interface works well for its original purposes, it does look a bit too familiar and dated.  In the next few months, we are going to revamp our entire interface to give Spokeo a renewed feel.  These new designs and functionality will be rolled out in stages, and our search results page will be the first to receive this major upgrade.  We will keep updating our latest development progress on this blog, so stay tuned!

People don’t always like new changes, and a very good example is Facebook users’ recent uproar against its new designs.  We understand that Spokeo has been working very well for a lot of people so far, so we don’t want to screw up the existing formula.  We will carefully listen to every user’s feedback as we roll out these new changes.  And we guarantee that Spokeo main design philosophy - simplicity - will stay intact.

We just got on the MSN front page couple hours ago.  As expected, hundred of thousands of people are flocking to Spokeo right now, and the incoming traffic is beyond our imagination.  The site has ground to a halt, and even we administrators cannot access it at the moment.  We don’t have a solution for this because we cannot stop people from coming to the site, and buying ten more servers today will not help our immediate needs.  As a result, we will just have to wait it out until the traffic subsides to a more reasonable level.

We are sorry about this service disruption to our existing users.  We’ve always planned to have 50% more capacity available to handle unexpected traffic spikes, and due to our planning, we have been able to weather through all the PCWorld, Wall Street Journal, Sina, and other mainstream press around the world.  However, getting on the third largest website in the world (msn.com) is a little bit too much for us to handle today.

Today, Spokeo ranks as the 50th most searched term in the world based on Google Trends statistics and salmonbones report.  Below is the Top 50 Rankings on March 12, 2009.

1.     kelly clarkson pregnant
2.     diggnation
3.     google voice
4.     going john galt
5.     nixie
6.     grandcentral
7.     usc shooting
8.     dig.com
9.     scout relocation
10.     raul malo
11.     joaquin guzman
12.     mavis leno
13.     jonas brothers purity rings
14.     hawk scout aqua scooter
15.     the duel 2
16.     forbes rich list
17.     the dead weather
18.     pedro zamora
19.     casserole queens
20.     kara cooney
21.     robert morris university
22.     kelly clarkson weight gain
23.     charles lewis
24.     rita brum
25.     america s next top model cycle 12 episode 3
26.     super ninja bikini babes
27.     gary spivey
28.     itunes dj
29.     south park the ring
30.     south park jonas brothers
31.     home sweet home lyrics
32.     lost season 5 episode 9
33.     tapout
34.     anna anisimova
35.     an horse
36.     forbes magazine
37.     grass mud horse
38.     robert pattinson gq
39.     innovalight
40.     paradise point san diego
41.     texas a m basketball
42.     jason trawick
43.     ferrari crash
44.     james tupper
45.     obama deception
46.     trivia
47.     joyce dewitt
48.     xbox live down
49.     american idol top 11
50.     spokeo

We are very excited that Spokeo is gaining so much momentum.  We have been working on a very new technology, and we cannot wait to introduce it to our users soon.

Last Thursday afternoon, we made the biggest change in our infrastructure and moved all our servers to a new data center.  After 12 hours of continuous work, we have successfully pushed Spokeo back online.  While this transition looks smooth and without hiccups on the surface, there were actually some problems underneath (unsurprisingly for this kind of infrastructure change) that our users cannot immediately notice.  Couple servers are broken, and a lot of little bugs sprung out.  Fortunately, due to the robustness of our infrastructure design, none of these problems interrupts our basic service.  That said, these problems do affect our site’s performance and stability, and we are working hard to restore everything back to normal.  We should be able to fix all these issues and complete the entire transition by the end of this week.  Thanks for everyone’s patience.

We are moving!  We have outgrown our current data center, so we are moving our servers to a new location on Thursday, 1/22/2009.  Spokeo.com will be offline for several hours while we move, so please bear with us while we find a better home for Spokeo. 

Spokeo is expected to go back up at the end of the day, and we will keep updating our progress on this blog.

UPDATE:  As everyone can see, the site is back up now.

Want to wish everyone a Merry Christmas!  - Spokeo Team.