Introducing Spokeo Famous People Search!

This is big news, folks. With over a million profiles on anyone you can imagine, living or dead, Spokeo Famous People Search takes the guilt out of America’s guiltiest pleasure. If they’re famous, they’re here: Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber, Bill Gates, Mickey Mantle… the list goes on. Each celebrity profile has the latest news, videos and photos available – think Wikipedia with a little bit of TMZ thrown in for good measure. To accomplish the huge task of putting together all these profiles, our world-class engineers have harnessed the cutting-edge power of semantic technology to identify and categorize millions of celeb bios, photos, videos, news and just about everything else. Kill some time (or lots of it) by browsing Spokeo’s photo viewer, which boasts access to the largest collection of celebrity photos on the web. We are proud and excited to be bringing people search into the future. Searching celebs has never been this fun.

Some cool features:
- Millions of photos – the largest collection of celeb photos freely available on the web.
- Simplified timeline showing important events in the life of each famous person.
- Relationship information ranging from family and friends to love interests and flings.
- Realtime Twitter map of celebrity spottings and whereabouts.

Head to our homepage and start searching!

You’ve come to the right place. We are looking for a talented and experienced full-time Web Application Developer/Programmer to work on our Ruby-on-Rails website. We offer a fun, friendly work environment, 90th-percentile salary (according to Salary.com) and benefits.

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS

- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science;
- Solid understanding of OO design and all computer science fundamentals (algorithms, data structures, …);
- Solid understanding of SQL database concepts and performance;
- Web application development experience in Ruby on Rails, Java Spring/Struts + Hibernate, or other modern MVC framework;
- Knowledge of XHTML, JavaScript, CSS

NICE THINGS TO HAVE

- 3+ years of software development experience in Linux/Unix environment;
- Experience with high-performance, high-traffic web systems

This position is on-site only, and our offices are located in sunny Pasadena, California. Not located in the Los Angeles area? That’s okay, too – we’ll pay for any relocation cost.

If you are interested, please reply back to jobs [at] spokeo.com with your resume and links to websites you’ve worked on (if you have ‘em).

Be sure and keep an eye on our Jobs page for any more openings in the future. We’d love for you to be part of the team!

Spokeo is one of the most trusted names in people search. We have grown by leaps and bounds in the last year and we’d like you to be part of our success. Thanks to considerable buzz on Facebook and Twitter, as well as high-profile features in news outlets like Time Magazine (where we were recently interviewed for a cover story), our brand is now synonymous with people search. Everyone is looking to “Spokeo” someone they know, making us the hottest people search website on the web.

Our powerful technology has earned accolades and reviews from Newsweek, Fox News, the Wall Street Journal and USA Today, among others. The valuable data Spokeo aggregates means that users love our product and we have a high conversion rate. You are now in prime position to generate some serious revenue!

BENEFITS

Before you get started, let me briefly summarize the benefits of being a Spokeo affiliate:

· 75% Commission – No other People Search site offers a higher commission to their affiliates.

· Brand Recognition – Spokeo has built a nationally recognized brand. We have earned an A rating from the Better Business Bureau and our customer service is second to none.

· 60-Day Cookie – Longest duration cookie in the industry.

· Attractive, Customizable Creatives – Spokeo has a world-class team of designers, and is the most stylish, user-friendly People Search site on the web. Our ads are guaranteed to get you clicks and conversions.

· Support – Our dedicated affiliate management and world-class engineering staff is always here to help you. Email us anytime at affiliates@spokeo.com.

GETTING STARTED

It’s easy! To register, simply go to http://www.spokeoaffiliates.com and fill out the quick and easy form. Once logged-in, you can choose from our nifty array of widgets, banners and text links. Pick the one you like (or customize it), and simply copy and paste the code into your website.  Our sophisticated tracking software records all clicks and conversions on your user dashboard, so you can keep track of your progress.

If you have any questions, concerns or chocolate chip cookie recipes, contact us any time. We’d love to hear from you.

Do you want to figure out who that mysterious missed call is from? Did you get some digits from the club last night but can’t remember her name? Do you have your friend’s phone number but need their address?

Yes?

Well, what are you waiting for? Start searching: http://www.spokeo.com/reverse-phone-lookup

While that’s pretty darn easy, our search engine also allows you to add the city after a name (i.e. "John Smith Los Angeles"). But since we’re all about helping you find the person you are looking for in record time, we’ve decided to make it even quicker and easier than that. Now when you enter the first and last name in the search bar, feel free to add just PART of the city as well and we’ll do the rest!

For example, type "John Smith Los," and Spokeo will generate a personalized suggestion box with a list of cities ranked based on your location. So if you’re in California and searching "John Smith Los" we’ll suggest "Los Angeles" first, while if you’re in Texas we might suggest "Los Fresnos" instead. Once the list appears you can simply click or use the arrow keys to select the desired city in the suggestion box and you’re good to go! We call it our "location auto-suggest" feature, but since that’s sort of an awkward name you can just call it "Time Saver 5000." You’re gonna love it!

-I’ll start with the one you are looking at: our new blog! We’ve been angling for a new blog design for a while now. Oh sure, the old layout was fine and all, but it always felt a little, I don’t know, flat. Sterile. Plain. Anodyne. Somnifacent even! (Oh no he didn’t!) And that’s a shame, because Spokeo is anything but. This new design is bold and fresh, and it packs in a whole lot of posts on one page for your viewing pleasure.

-Our Privacy page, which allows anyone to to remove their listing, has been transformed. What was formerly a simple blank form now includes a helpful illustration of the different elements that make up a Spokeo listing (phonebooks, public social network profiles, real estate listings), so that you can see how we aggregate all that publicly-accessible data.

-We’ve also made some touch-ups to our Friends feature, making it easier than ever to see what your buddies are up to.

We like these new layouts a whole lot, and hope you do too. (A personal fave: the hedgehog peeking out from behind the blog. Man, that is some USDA Prime Certified Cute right there!)

I don’t believe in astrology; I’m a Sagittarius and we’re skeptical.

Astrology has been around in one form or another for thousands of years, and remains popular as ever. People are fascinated by the idea that the stars and planets have an effect on their personality and future; We’ve all met someone who, moments after meeting us, will ask the eternal question: "What’s your sign?" Like Clarke, I’m a Sagittarius, which according to Astrology-Online means that I "have a positive outlook on life, [am] full of enterprise, energy, versatility, adventurousness and eagerness" (true!). It also says that I am "exacting, domineering and inconsiderate in the work place." Also true – everyone hates me here!

While I’m more of an extispicy man myself (I won’t decide on a pair of socks without consulting a sheep’s liver!), even the most hardened skeptic will admit to taking a peak at his horoscope now and then. Astrology can be a lot of fun, and, as you may have gathered, we here at Spokeo don’t like being left out of the fun. This started us thinking: if every major newspaper and magazine in the country gets to feature an astrological section, why can’t we? And at that moment, with Sirius and Orion in perfect alignment and Venus gliding into the fifth house, the Spokeo Astrological Reading section was born!

This is the latest component of our name search and phone search features. Simply type in a name or phone number, pull up the desired listing, click on "Astrological Reading" section in the Table of Contents and you will see that person’s zodiac sign (Western and Chinese) along with their personality traits and compatibility ratings. See if you and your neighbor are celestial matches, or if being born in the Year of the Monkey explains why he wears shoes in the pool.

Try it now!

This blog is many things, to be sure: a clearing house of truth, a dependable place for a good read and, of course, a repository of good old-fashioned nightmare fuel. It’s also where we give you the latest updates on what is going on in our world, whether it be a site redesign, a snapshot of the month’s most popular searches or mentions of Spokeo in the news. Spokeo recently turned 5, and we’re coming off of our biggest year yet.

Some recent Spokeo news highlights include:

•  Spokeo feature in Time Magazine
•  Spokeo’s name and email search makeover
•  Spokeo’s new and improved phone search

There are many exciting things we have planned for you, so please keep checking this blog regularly for all Spokeo-related news.  We’ve only just begun!

The latest redesign is subtle, but effective. You will notice that our homepage has been lightly altered. The logo is smaller, but just as purdy.The fonts are sleeker, dare I say…sexier? (No, I won’t say that, as that’s really creepy.) One of the more substantial changes involves our name search, specifically the way our system narrows down the search for you. For the most part, our name search function works the same as before: when you type "John Doe" into the search bar, you are prompted to narrow the search by selecting the state. After you select the correct state,  the menu on the left will now display a list of cities and areas for you to choose from. Previously, our system gave you a list of bolded "John Doe"s with the addresses in smaller font under the name. This latest tweak is simply to help you find the person you are looking for faster, by emphasizing the general area of residence. We think you’ll like it a lot.

Another small addition/improvement relates to our email search. As you know, when you type an email address into Spokeo, our search engine scours dozens upon dozens of social networks to locate matching profiles. These profiles can range from Twitter feeds, to Facebook profiles, to Amazon wishlists and everything in between. While Facebook and Twitter may dominate the field, there are a lot of social networks out there, and it can be confusing to keep track of them all. To help acquaint you with some of the networks that may be unfamiliar to you, we’ve added short descriptions of them on the email search page. After you’ve searched the email address, simply hover the mouse over the network name and a small info-bubble will appear with a helpful summary of what the network is, and what it does. You’ll soon be impressing friends and colleagues at parties with your encyclopedic knowledge of Wretch!

To this, Stein counters that "it’s still too easy to find our gardens. Your political donations, home value and address have always been public, but you used to have to actually go to all these different places – courthouses, libraries, property-tax assessors’ offices – and request documents." To call what we do – collecting all of this disparate public information in one handy place – "too easy," is accidentally hitting the nail on the head: we are trying to make it easy!

Compare what we do to what Wikipedia does. Imagine yourself sometime in the prehistoric mists of the pre-internet age: the year is 1977. The Bee Gees’ latest hit single "Stayin Alive" is booming on the 8-track. You’re busy adding rhinestones to your bellbottoms, and suddenly you wonder: Who was the Germans’ chief strategist during the Franco-Prussian war? (We’ve all been there!) In those days you would have had to walk down to your local library, consult the card catalog or librarian, search for the desired book in the stacks, take it down, and flip through the pages for the answer. In 2011, however, you type a few words into Google, and faster than you can say Beschleunigungsstreifen, you have the answer: Helmuth von Moltke the Elder (duh!). The information is the same – it’s just a lot less of a hassle to get it. And I think all of us are thankful for that.
 
In the end, Stein comes to a sane conclusion. "The more I learned about data mining," Stein writes, "the less concerned I was. Sure, I was surprised that all these companies are actually keeping permanent files on me. But I don’t think they will do anything with them that does me any harm."

Amen.