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.

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.

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.

As the need to find people becomes ever more common, people are associating Spokeo with People Search. A great example of this can be seen in a recent article published by the Wall Street Journal.

Simply stated by its author:

Spokeo.com is a search site operated by Spokeo Inc., a startup that lets users see what their friends are doing on other Web sites.

The best-selling financial newspaper in America mentions a few other people search technologies before wrapping up with:

Ruth Funabiki, a 57-year-old law librarian in Moscow, Idaho, recently discovered through Spokeo that a friend added something unusual to her wish list on Amazon.com: one of those disposable pads that protects mattresses from bedwetters. "There’s a voyeuristic aspect to it," she says. "I’m embarrassed. I shouldn’t be looking."

Spokeo is the only search engine to reveal this amount of detail. We are changing the nature of people search and turning it int o a much more personal experience. Previously, people search was only used by background checks companies and law enforcement. Now it is a tool for everyone.

Yahoo! People Search may appear to be the best choice for searching people given its brand power, however finding information about people is more than just displaying an address and a phone number. When you’re searching for someone you want more than cold, impersonal data; you want personal photos, videos, and blogs.

Well, look no further! Spokeo people search investigates deeper than any other search engine to show you what people have posted on the Web.  With Spokeo, we’ll search that person down even if they’re using the username "hotgirl69."  So go ahead and search people to see what you can find. We guarantee that you’ll be shocked.

I know everyone has heard of Craigslist since it is the place to find any bargain imaginable. If fact, to be quite honest, I purchased my current vehicle on the site some years back (Boy, did I get a sweet deal). But whatever your reason may be for surfing Craigslist, be it deals or dating, one thing is certain: you’ll have to meet the person face-to-face to finalize the transaction.

Well, if you’re like me, you’ll want to know a bit more about someone before meeting up at 9:45pm in a grocery store parking lot to buy a 32GB Ipod Touch. So why not learn something more through people search? Why not research this person online to make sure it’s someone you want to do business with?

Or for dating purposes, why not make sure this person has a clean MySpace page?

Well, with Spokeo people search it’s a done deal. Spokeo is designed to work with only an email address.

Remember, life is too valuable to meet up with complete strangers! So search people and be safe!