If you’ve been using Spokeo regularly, you’d probably notice that we’ve been making improvements on Spokeo almost every other day.  We get thousands of emails a day, but we still do try to reply back to every single one of them – even if it’s not within 24 hours like we used to.  We will continue to improve our customer service and adjust our technology according to user feedback.

We’ve just pushed a major update today.  We’ve upgraded the entire site and the premium user interface to the new Spokeo 4.0 theme, and we’ve added couple new search improvements for our premium users.  We’ve also improved our privacy opt-out mechanism so that it won’t raise red flags for legitimate opt-out requests.  We don’t claim that the new algorithm is 100% perfect, but it should drastically cut down the false alarms.  As mentioned in the previous post, we are still working on a privacy feature that helps users monitor and safeguard their online footprints.  It should be ready in the coming weeks.

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!

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.

We’ve just released an update that revamps our entire friend-finding usage flow. Our previous design was modeled after AIM and Yahoo Messenger, in which you have to press "+" to access any friend-finding functionality. Many people didn’t get that design analogy.

After reading all your feedback, we’ve realized that people want "search." We sat down and refocused the Spokeo interface around search. Now you can see a prominent search bar on the very top. If you want to import your friends, just click on "import" next to the search bar.

Try it out! I hope these changes will make Spokeo even simpler to use than before.

Up until this week, we didn’t have a designer on hand, so the search bar isn’t pretty by any means. Raphael, our new artist, will be improving our graphics, as well as making our minimalist design even cleaner.

We’re currently upgrading Spokeo to its latest version, with some really nifty features we hope you’ll enjoy.

With the latest version of Spokeo, you’ll be able to find all of your friends’ content.  Discover that MySpace page you never knew your friend used.  See all the photos your friends have been uploading to Flickr that you were never aware of!

After you’ve found all of them, what do you do?  Use Spokeo to track them, obviously.  Stay tuned.

Whenever I try out a new application, I never read the Help section or the user manual. I dislike reading, and a text-only Help section doesn’t help. Moreover, most Help sections have too much information, and I can’t easily find the answer to my questions. Consumers like myself are lazy and demanding. We don’t want to spend too much time trying to figure out new things. If a new application doesn’t meet our expectations, we will simply leave, rather than investing a few minutes to learn how it works.

This creates a conflict between designers writing a comprehensive Help section and users not reading it. If the designer keeps instructions short, users don’t get it. If the designer writes out every detail, users don’t read it. At Spokeo we didn’t build in a Help section when we first launched because we thought no one would read it. Users complained that a site without Help is unprofessional. At last, we put up an extensive FAQ section. Unfortunately, no one reads it.

As you know, Spokeo’s design philosophy is utilitarian and minimalist. We don’t like to have buttons that no one uses, and for a long time, the unused Help button went against our philosophy. We couldn’t take it out, since everyone is just so used to seeing (but not using) that button. After several design meetings, I think we have come up a good compromise.

When you press Help in Spokeo, you’ll see a few Help balloons pop up. They point to features that you might not have noticed, and explain how these advanced features work. The ballons give you the information you need quickly and when you are looking for it, If you click on the main balloon in the top right corner, it will bring you to the traditional FAQ section. And of course, any time you have a question, you can press Feedback to talk to me (I, alone, am the customer service department). I generally reply within hours on weekdays.

So please try out the new Help. Hopefully you will find it to be more helpful now.

One of the most difficult features to implement is the import/add progress. It’s a small detail that shows up only when you add something new, or when you import an account. However, it takes a lot of engineering time and talent to do it right.

Let’s walk through the process of importing an account. First, we have to authenticate your credentials on a third-party site. Next, we have to find your friends on MySpace, Friendster, or Flickr. Many of our users have hundreds of friends on those social networks. We check each of your friends’ content and bring back their content to your Spokeo account.

Think about how long it takes to load your friends’ MySpace pages or Flickr album on your browser. On average it takes about 1 to 2 seconds. Now multiply that time by 100, and you can see that it takes 200 seconds, or more than 3 minutes to bring just 100 friends’ updates back to you. Now you’ll wonder, why Spokeo is so quick in bringing back your friends’ content (we take about 20 seconds as opposed to 200 seconds to bring 100 results back to you). Well, the secret is "parallelism".

It does take one computer 200 seconds to import 100 friends; after all, you can’t trick the math. However, what if you can divide out the tasks to 10 computers? Now each computer will only have to independently process 10 friends (hence "parallelism"), and the time can be reduced to 20 seconds. This sounds simple, but it is actually very hard to do. When given the command to talk to each other computers may talk simultaneously or fight for the talking time. You need a complicated management system to keep everything in sync.

Building and managing this complicated cluster of computers is a delicate process like making a watch, any little crash will cause the end result to malfunction.

Now with the time cut down from 200 seconds to 20 seconds (it can’t be cut down further because of scaling issues, but that is a blog for some other time), we feel like that is still not enough. Users are accustomed to Google’s millisecond speed, if a site appears inactive for 3 seconds, people will leave. This is why we have invested months of engineering time to build a progress report that tells you exactly what’s going on. Now our computers not only have to talk to each other, they also have to talk to our users. Needless to say, that made our job more challenging, but worthwhile.

Why did we invest months of time to refine such a detail? We feel it’s the details that makes the Spokeo experience better. Both Toyota Camry and Pontiac Grand Prix drive fine and cost about 20K, but Toyota has included higher quality materials and built a more intuitive design. We feel our users deserve the little details that make using Spokeo an easy to use service. While we concentrate on bringing you cool features, we will continue to refine the existing ones. As we’ve said over and over again, we see each feature not as a one-time add on, but as an ongoing tool that can be refined and made better. Our attention to detail is a commitment to our loyal users.

Many of your friends have private blogs and profiles. Before, you couldn’t track them on Spokeo. Now you can!

This sounds like a no-brainer that should have been done months ago. In fact, many users have requested this. It’s taken us a while because it’s really hard to do (I don’t think you can find a similar system anywhere else). Every website has its unique way of handling privacy, and we needed to preserve the privacy of the original content owner. The two design keys were (1) accuracy and (2) automation. (1) Means that Spokeo has implemented a privacy system that is at least as private as the original system. Nothing can get leaked from Spokeo. (2) Means that this system is hassle-free to Spokeo users. We replicate whatever systems were in place at the original site automatically!

We have accomplished these two goals with this release while keeping the UI clean and simple. The sophisticated managment is implemented completely behind the scenes. New users simply need to import their accounts to see friends’ private blogs & photos. Old users need to delete and re-import to see private content. We are working on smoothing that process right now.

We treat privacy very seriously, and we wouldn’t have released this feature if we didn’t feel confident in protecting user privacy. That said, yesterday was the birth of this complicated and unprecedented system, so I am sure there are a lot more details to refine.

As a matter of fact, we have already found two additional bugs. First, new users could not register since yesterday’s release (now fixed). Second, existing users have to delete their friends and re-import to track their private friends’ content (we are working on an automated transition right now). As always, we welcome your help in reporting bugs, so please use feedback or email me at harrison@spokeo.com if you’ve found one.

We’re currently installing some new features on Spokeo that you may be interested in.  Most importantly, Spokeo is now supporting your private friends!  When you ask us to import all your friends from your social network account, we will now not only provide you all the public ones, but also the private ones as well for you to read.  How do I import all my friends, you ask?  Let’s walk through the process.

First, click on the "Add Buddy" button at the bottom left of your buddy list.  This will bring up the "Add Buddies" screen.  You’ll notice that you have several options for adding your friends.  The second option is to import all your friends from a social network, and looks like the following:

When you provide your social network account to us, we will see what friends you have there and add them all to your Spokeo buddy list.  Once you do that, you can stay up to date with all of them on Spokeo!  Whenever you check back in with Spokeo, we’ll let you know who has written something new since you last checked in with us.

Note that you can still only read what your social network account allows you to read from your private friends.  This is by no means a way to sneakily read something you weren’t allowed to read.

We hope the added friend coverage that we’re providing you now will make Spokeo even more useful to you.

You may have noticed that Spokeo went down for some upgrading.  Wonder what that upgrade is?  Read on!

If you’ve been using Spokeo for a while now, you may have become familiar with our black/red theme.  But, have you ever wondered what browsing Spokeo under different color theme would look like?  Now, you no longer have to wonder, because your dream has become reality.

If you check out Spokeo now, we have since replaced the default black/red theme with a blue one.  But, that’s not all.  Not only have we changed themes, but we’ve also made even more!  If you’re a registered user, go to your Accounts page and select the "Themes" option, as shown here:

Here, you can select themes to your heart’s content.   Feeling nostalgic?  Return to the old theme!  Want something new?  Try some of our other themes!  Check back periodically, as we will continually be adding new themes for you to enjoy.

Another feature we’ve added are some helpful hints to guide you through the Spokeo interface.  Click the "Help" option in the upper right corner of the site to bring up the hints.

We hope this will help you understand how to use aspects of Spokeo that you may not have known about.  We hope the little bit of downtime is outweighed by the benefits the new features bring.