Spokeo Blog | Find People through People Search

The all-new Spokeo 3.0 is finally here.  Check out our new homepage:

We have added three new Business editions to better serve our business customers.  We have also revamped and upgraded our old HR product to the new Recruiting edition.  People search queries across all Spokeo products are now running on the new integrated platform below:

You should also notice speed and performance improvements.  One of our major 3.0 features, consumer data, was not able to make it into this release.  We are still working on it, and we hope to introduce it within the next two months.  Lastly, as with any major software release, there are still a lot of rough edges that we need to smooth out.  If you found any bug, please don’t hesitate to contact us right away.

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.

If you’ve been trying to check Spokeo People Search or our blog recently, you may have been told that it was down.  Unfortunately, this weekend, our ISP has been having a lot of technical issues which directly affected us.  We’re sorry for this recent extended downtime and will be working with our ISP to ensure that this does not happen again. 

Since then, we have moved our blog to another ISP to prevent this from happening again.  Thanks for your understanding and have a great Labor Day!

Remember when you first googled yourself? You didn’t know want to expect, but you’ll have to admit that it was pretty darn cool to see yourself as a result.  You were, in fact, someone who Goggle felt important enough to index and share to the world. But after you goggled yourself (and of course others) you came to realize that there wasn’t much to it. Googling yourself and others became boring. There was no excitement in finding out what you likely already knew about yourself and others: college attended, a photo here or there, company employment roster, formerly authored school report, etc.

Where was all the "good stuff?"

The "good stuff" was being mined by people search companies like Spokeo People Search. Today, companies like this allow users to simply import their email contacts and obtain deep, comprehensive results. Full of photos, videos, blogs, and shopping lists, Spokeo People Search gives you true insight into someone’s lifestyle without jeopardizing privacy norms.  Check it out on Spokeo.com.

In essence, search has changed. Googling yourself and others has evolved into a specialized people search.

The great Benjamin Disraeli once said "Change is inevitable. Change is constant."  Searching yourself and others will never quite be the same.