There’s a limit to how many friends you can connect online. Most people can only maintain friendships with 20 ~ 40 people. Beyond that, friends are no more than profile images on MySpace.

One of Spokeo’s original goals is to increase that social limit, to enable people to easily connect with hundreds of friends. We believe that by better organizing and highlighting relevant information, we can help people manage their expanding online life.

Check out the “updated” mode. Click on “updated” on the top of your buddy list, and only friends with new updates will show. If you got 100 friends, most likely only 20 of them have something new to say at any given day. With the “updated” mode, you can quickly see who got new updates and who doesn’t.

Once you click on a friend and read it, that friend will disappear in the “updated” mode’s buddy list. This way the buddy list is kept clean and organized. If you want to go back and revisit the old post, simply click on “all” to get your entire buddy list back again.

What is this?  Is it another geek’s term?  Give me a minute to explain, and you’ll find this feature very useful.

Spokeo tells you the number of new updates since you last clicked on a buddy (in other words, since the last time you read that person).  If there’s something new that you haven’t seen, a number shows up next to that buddy, and the entire buddy is in bold. Now, you’ve already run through the updates from the closest friends you care about, but you are too lazy to go through the rest of the buddy list. Or you just don’t care enough to read through the rest of the news. What do you do?

That’s what “mark all as read” is for.  Right click on the buddy list, select “mark all as read” on the bottom.  Now you can see that all numbers are reset to “0″, and your buddy list goes back to normal (not in bold).

As you can see, this feature is very hard to find, and we don’t think that most people know what it is unless we tell them. This is why we are still debating how to make it more intuitive and prominent. If you got an idea, please leave your suggestion below!

Imagine this scenario. You’re using Spokeo, happily stalking getting caught up with your friends. You click around, checking out racy pics and random drunken posts. Then you wonder to yourself, “how do I do XXXXXXX in Spokeo?” You look around for the button but cannot find it. You go to the folks at Spokeo and lament, “Please let me do XXXXXXX when I’m using Spokeo!” We listen to your plight. Flash forward a week or two. You make your daily visit to Spokeo. The feature you requested is sitting right there ready for you to use. This makes your day, and you live happily ever after.

This is not a fantasy. You can be the hero of this tale.

At the top of the Spokeo UI, you will see several navigational options. One of those can help you live out this dream. Can you guess which one? Indeed, it is the one cleverly named “Feedback”. When you click on this link, you will be shown a screen where you can tell us anything you want. Talk to us. Let us know what you want to see in Spokeo. Let us know what’s working for you. Let us know what’s not.

We want you to be able to voice your opinion regarding Spokeo. Give us feedback!

Ever wish you didn’t have to use your mouse to browse through all your buddies’ content on Spokeo? Just want to read the content you haven’t read? Your dreams have finally been realized!

Today we introduced keyboard shortcuts to Spokeo. Now, if you can’t find your mouse or it has run out of batteries, you need not fear. You can still read to your heart’s desire with just your trusty keyboard.

When using Spokeo, you may have noticed a little tip at the top of your homepage describing the Left and Right arrow keys and hinting at more shortcuts. The Left and Right keys allow you to go from article to article within a buddy, expanding the full article as you go along. You no longer will have to click on [more] to see the rest of the article, and you don’t have to click “Next” page.

Once you’re done reading one buddy’s content, why not go on to the next or previous buddy in your list? Here’s where N and P come in handy. Pressing these keys will bring up the (N)ext or (P)revious buddy’s content.

Just want to read new content? Try (c)ycling through all the new content by pressing C. This will jump from new article to new article, skipping over any already read buddies in the process. A quick way to get up to speed!

Lastly, if you want to toggle the “All”/”Updated” filter on your buddy list, press B.

We hope these shortcuts will be beneficial to you in your quest to stay up to date with all your friends’ content. Practice your shortcuts and soon all your friends will be in awe of your Spokeo navigation prowess.

Welcome to the new home of the Spokeo blog. Here you can get a first look at things going on within the company as well as our opinions on various topics relating to Spokeo. We hope you find this blog useful.