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.

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.

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.

As you might have noticed, we use Paypal for our payment processor.  What does this mean?  It means that Paypal handles all our transactions and credit card processing.  When you enter your credit card to buy a Spokeo premium account, we pass all that info right to Paypal, and then Paypal takes care of the rest.  Paypal (an Ebay company) is a reputable brand known for their data security, so we chose Paypal for that extra peace of mind.

Paypal has been experiencing a big problem since Thursday (11/6), and they are not processing payments correctly for all their merchants (yup, this is a big problem affecting a lot of people).  Since we don’t store any of our customers’ financial info, there’s nothing we can do at the moment other than to wait for Paypal’s resolution.  We have been talking to Paypal since Friday morning to resolve this issue, but Paypal has yet to come up a solution. 

We are giving all affected customers complimentary premium accounts right now, so most of you should not notice any problem or service hiccup.  That said, if you notice anything wrong, please let us know right away, and we will resolve all issues as soon as Paypal fixes their problems.  Thank you for your patience and understanding.

Spokeo has been down since 4am PST this morning due to the power outage at our data center.  This power outage has affected many sites, and our data center provider is fixing this problem right now.  Spokeo should be back online this morning. 

Update: The power at our data center is back up after 6 hours of outage, so Spokeo is up and running now.

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!

We haven’t announced a lot of new features lately, but that does not mean we’ve stopped innovating. We upgrade our system regularly to improve our performance , which explains why the service is down every two weeks. Most of the works are happening underneath to keep the service speedy as we grow our user base.

We’ve recently introduced username search as a new search heuristic to help you find more people. Now you just need to type in someone’s username, then we will search across all the social networks for their content. More social networks support username search than email search, so this functionality will help broaden your reach significantly. We are still working on tying all the search heuristics together, so stay tune for a more powerful Spokeo to come.

We are currently undergoing some server maintenance as of 10pm PDT, June 17.  We apologize for the inconvenience.  We expect to be back online in a few hours.

Spokeo will be undergoing server maintenance between Saturday, June 7 00:00 – 12:00 UTC.  In the US, that means Friday evening, June 6 starting at 5pm PDT.

During this time, the Spokeo website will be down and unusable, as we will be performing some necessary database maintenance.  No data will be lost during this maintenance window.

We apologize for this inconvenience and will be working hard to get the site up as soon as possible.