“A Savage Garden CD…Pleather Moon Boots…a DVD copy of Leprechaun: In The Hood (starring Ice-T)!? It’s like they know me!

Well, that’s because they do know you to some extent; websites like Amazon or Facebook create algorithms based on user-preferences and behavior to determine what content you see in hopes of improving your user-experience, holding your interest and, if possible, getting you to buy something. This is all the result of a growing trend on the web in recent years known as “personalization.” While personalizing the web for each person may seem like a logical step towards making the web more user-friendly, there are a surprising number of dissenting voices.

I read an interesting book a few months ago by one of them called The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You. The book’s author (Eli Pariser) is one of many critics of the personalizing trend. These critics worry that altering or filtering content based on a machine’s idea of our identity will only keep us in a bubble with other like-minded people who see only the news and information they “want” to see. Pariser’s argument has a definite political bent, as he feels that personalization is inimical to Democratic ideals, a Balkanization of the web that “filters” access to challenging viewpoints and new ideas. (For example, if Amazon didn’t personalize recommendations, I might be a little more open-minded and able to break out of my pleather moonbooted cocoon.)

While opponents of the “personalization” trend have put forth intelligent critiques, there has recently been some push-back. An article by Farhad Manjoo over at Slate reports on a new study conducted by Eytan Bakshy, an Information theorist at the University of Michigan, which seems to indicate that the web is not so much of an echo-chamber as critics like Pariser may think. Bakshy’s experiment looked at two different groups on Facebook and the ways they shared links with their ‘friends.’

Facebook runs an algorithm called EdgeRank that calculates which friend’s links show up in your feed – if it’s a close friend with whom you communicate a lot with on the site, for instance, you’ll see their links before you see any links shared by a second cousin whom you friended 3 years ago. Bakshy used an algorithm of his own to randomly censor which links each group saw: one group would see links shared by their friends (and could thus choose to share them with their own group of Facebook friends), and the other group would not see those links (but could very well find them on their own and choose to share the links themselves).

Bakshy’s experiment found two important things: firstly, the closer you are with someone on Facebook, the more you’ll share their links. That seems obvious enough, and seems to confirm Pariser’s echo-chamber thesis. The other finding, however, is equally simple but also surprising: we still share a bunch of links we get from weak ties. These “weak” links come from people outside your bubble of like-minded friends who are likely visiting websites you don’t look at on a daily basis. These links introduce “novel” information into the system, and considering the fact that most of your Facebook friends are weak ties, the social network experience may not be as sheltered as you think (we’re still seeing a lot of links posted by those weird distant cousins, and sharing them too).

The debate is by no means over, of course. It’s clear that it deserves further investigation and study. We here at Spokeo People Search have a vested interest in this topic, as we are all about bringing people together and providing equal access to information. No matter where you stand on the issue, I think we can all agree that the Internet should be a place to open your mind and expand your knowledge.

We here at Spokeo People Search know the value of a pretty infographic, dealing as we do with an overwhelming mass of people-related data, and so I quite liked FlowingData’s recent post about an installation that projects Facebook connections between people on to the floor beneath them.  According to the creators of the installation, “colored lines extend from the circles connecting people who share one or more of the observed metrics (mutual friends, interests, workplaces, schools, locations, birth sign, or non-English languages). When two or more people, who have mutual connections, stand within close proximity, a slideshow of mutual friends and interests appear between them.”

It’s fun to think about meeting a total stranger – maybe even a stranger from the other side of the world – inside this installation and instantly seeing the connections between you inside that vaguely Kabbalistic web. Do you like the same movie? Have the same birthdate? Do you have a friend in common? If not, how many degrees separate you? (Most likely around 6 at the most).

The Facebook installation is a wonderful and creative way to visualize our increasing interconnectedness. While Spokeo isn’t a social network, we are still very much committed to the idea that our people technology has a vital part to play in this incredibly shrinking world (after all, it’s in our name). We use sophisticated data algorithms to help people make connections; our name search, reverse phone search, reverse email search and username search capabilities are designed to bridge gaps between people – family, friends and yes, strangers.

It’s funny because it’s true. Remember that person with 1500 Facebook friends I mentioned in a recent blog? I just looked and can confirm that they’ve uploaded over 5,000 photos of themselves to Facebook. I didn’t even think the Eiffel Tower had been photographed that many times, but there you go. There’s no doubt that we are taking a lot of pictures these days. How many you say? Jonathan Good over at 1000Memories.com has an interesting blog post on this very topic, complete with some fancy mathimicatin’ calculatorians and estimatings. Some fun facts:

-Every two minutes there are more photos taken than were taken during the whole of the 19th century. (Also: way more than were taken in the 5th century AD)

-Humanity has taken somewhere around 3.5 trillion photos since the advent of photography

-”Ten percent of all the photos we have were taken in the past 12 months.”

-70 billion photos will be uploaded to Facebook this year

Needless to say, Facebook is sizing up to be the largest photo library in history:

While it certainly helps that just about everything has a built-in camera these days (phones, laptops, MP3 players), the explosion in amateur photography can’t be entirely due to the ubiquity of digital. As much as social networking makes it easier for us to share, I think it’s clear that it also increases our desire to share; we see our friends uploading pictures and tweeting and we feel we have to join-in to become part of the fun. Not uploading 5,000 pictures to Facebook is becoming asocial.

However many billion photos we upload this year, Spokeo’s Reverse Email Search is easily the best way to sort thru them all. Search somebody’s email address and our state-of-the-art People Search technology will comb through the immense pile of online pictures in a matter of seconds. Try it now!

So what gives? Is this person really that popular? Maybe, though I’d wager that the great majority of those Facebook "friends" are not "friends" at all, but schoolmates, workmates, friends of friends, the odd second cousin or two. In fact, I’m quite willing to say that this person has no more than 150 "friends" (or stable social relations), and I have some science to back me up.

Robin Dunbar, a professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford, studies social relations between primates. He’s made some interesting observations in the course of work, the most interesting of which has to do with the number of members in a group and its relation to social cohesion. Dunbar noted during his studies that different species of primate all seem to form groups of similar size; in other words, groups with an average number of members who can interact and maintain group cohesion, which includes hours and hours of social grooming. Primates have seemed to hit upon a number of "friends" they can allow before the group seems to suffer. Dunbar thinks that this has something to do with the size of the brain (the neocortex, in particular) and its capacity for remembering. After all, one can only remember (and groom) so many monkeys a day.

But whereas social relations in monkeydom consist largely of sitting around and picking dead bugs out each other’s hair, humanity has evolved: we "Like" status updates on Facebook and tweet links to YouTube clips of monkeys sitting around and picking dead bugs out of each other’s hair. Man is essentially a monkey that wears pants (at least in public), and when it comes to our friends and contacts, there’s really not that much of a difference: the brain is bigger, and thus can handle larger numbers of relationships, but there is still a limit. In our case the magic number is, according to Dunbar, about 150.

With the growth of social networking, many have wondered whether there is a limit to the "friends" we can meaningfully interact with online. One study performed by Cameron Marlow (a research scientist at Facebook) calculated an average of 120 Facebook friends for a typical user, right in Dunbar’s predicted range of 100-230.

Now, 120 friends I can handle. Whether you have 120 or 1200 Facebook friends, we here at Spokeo have got you covered: our Friends feature allows you to keep tabs on all of your friends’ social network updates, from Tweets to photos on Flickr and new additions to an Amazon Wish List, all in one place. No other people search site offers a feature as useful. You can even import your contacts directly from your email. See here for more details.

“Information” is one of those words that we use a lot without quite understanding what it means. In one sense it can simply be defined as knowledge which can be communicated, whether through words (“Go!”),  light (green means drive!), sound (gunshot means run!)  or movement (thumbs up means good job!), just to name a few; information is encoded in DNA, it travels in the electric currents of your radio, the neurons in your brain. You could even say that it’s the very stuff the universe is made of: a drop of blood carries information about your age, ethnicity, health, ancestry. A tree trunk’s rings can encode the record of a stormy summer hundreds of years ago.

While information is as old as time, it’s pretty obvious that we are living in the most information-saturated age in history (Gleick’s book is subtitled A History, A Theory, A Flood). With such a flood of information, it’s perfectly natural to worry about overload, and I’ve written about it a few times before. As Gleick’s chapter on the telegraph amusingly makes clear, panicking about a surfeit of information is not exactly new. Many in America feared that the telegraph would mean the death of newspapers: “Anticipated at every point by the lightning wings of the Telegraph, [Newspapers] can only deal in local ‘items’ or abstract speculations [...] the infallible Telegraph will contradict their falsehoods as fast as they can publish them.” The ability for information to travel so quickly had its drawbacks, however: “Intelligence, thus hastily gathered and transmitted [...] is not so trustworthy as the news which starts later and travels slower.”Just to make it clear, that’s a journalist writing in 1845 about the telegraph, but it could just as well be a journalist writing about blogs in 2006, or Twitter in 2011.

There were also fears about privacy during the heyday of the telegraph. “Compared to handwritten letters, folded and sealed with wax, the whole affair seemed public and insecure – the messages passing along those mysterious conduits, the electric wires,”Gleick writes. This caused people to develop acronyms, slang even entire secret alphabets to conceal the meaning of their messages, as well as to quicken the communication process:

YMIR = Your message is received.
GMLT = Give my love to…

They almost read like 19th century precursors of LOL and BRB. (An early draft of the Gettysburg Address might have read: “4 Score n 7 yrs ago LMAO”).

More and more information requires more and more ways to collect, organize and store it, and the trouble they faced back then is essentially the same we face now. One way to think of Spokeo is as a mechanism that tries to shape the bewildering array of people-related information into one place. Spokeo’s People Search engine aims to provide the most comprehensive, up-to-date information possible. If there is information out there that can help you in your searches, we know that we can help find it, And you don’t even need to learn Morse code!

As the screenshot attests, Facebook and Google+ have a lot in common; so what makes Google+ stand apart? Well, a few things: your Facebook friends – whether they be family, friends, co-workers or mortal enemies – are all lumped into one all-encompassing category: your Friends list. Like MySpace before it, Facebook seems to sometimes emphasize the number of friends you have over anything else. Google +, on the other hand, lets you arrange your friends into different networks, called "circles," where members of your circle can chat and share content with one another (pictures from a summer picnic in your "Family" circle, mp3s of vaguely threatening German techno in your "Mortal Enemies" circle, etc.). You can even do group video chats in your circle. Managing your circles and adding friends is a cinch, and can generally be accomplished with some intuitive dragging-and-dropping.

Another way Google+ is different than Facebook is in the "Friend-ing" process itself, as Google has done away with having to "approve" friends; you can add others to your circle and they can add you without having make a "Friend Request." (It’s a little like Twitter in that sense: you can ‘follow’/'friend’ them and they can follow/friend you if they so choose.)

In addition to Gmail, Google+ also incorporates other Google products, including Picasa and Blogger (names soon to change) which will allow users to share pictures and blogs until the sun explodes. You can be sure that Facebook will be introducing plenty of new features to keep ahead of the competition, however – they’ve just incorporated video chat into the service, for one, so get ready for a real social networking "arms race." You can also be sure that Spokeo will be evolving alongside networks like Google+ and Facebook. Spokeo’s Email Search function, which pulls data from nearly every social network known to man, as well as our Friends feature (which allows you to keep up with their every Tweet, Flickr upload, Blogspot blog and YouTube favorite) become more and more useful with every day, as more and more of us continue to connect and share online.

Wrong! At least according to a new study from the Pew Research Center. The D.C.-based think tank surveyed 2,225 US adults on their internet usage, social networking habits and social life, and found some surprising correlations between the three. In short: social networkers have more friends than I do! (Need to start Tweeting more, I guess. By the way-are you following us on Twitter yet?)

Pew polled three types of people: those active on social networks, those who are online but not on a social network, and those who do not use the Internet. The study not only found that twice as many people are on social networks than there were three years ago (almost half of the total amount surveyed), but that these Internet-savvy folks are no longer basement-dwelling loners of yore – they are, in the words of Cosmo Kramer (in a slightly different context), out there and loving every minute of it!

Respondents with profiles on social networks, for example, on average reported having 2.45 "close" friends, while offline respondents averaged 1.75. Having a few close friend is one thing, but what about plain ol’ acquaintances? Do those of us on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn know more people? Well, yes we do, in fact: almost two hundred more on average. (Casey Johnson over at Ars Technica has a nice write-up about the study.)

One should be always be cautious in drawing too many conclusions from a study like this – surveys are necessarily provisional and limited in scope, and correlation is not causation. Still, it’s perfectly logical to think that social networking may be encouraging some of us to step out of our shells. Websites like Facebook and Twitter make it easy to communicate with people you’d probably never think to reach out to otherwise, and considering the amount of time we all are spending online, it’s no surprise that many of us are building closer friendships and larger networks of contacts. No longer is the Internet just a land of make-believe (although it certainly can be!) – the Internet is one place where we are living our lives. This is something of which we at Spokeo are very cognizant. As I wrote in my last blog,  Spokeo works hard to integrate different strands of data (i.e. information from Name Search, Email Search, Phone Search and Username Search) into a more fully-formed whole. We are the only People Search site that understands that our "online identity" is more and more a part of our "real" identity. As the Pew study shows, it’s getting a lot more tricky to draw a distinction between social life online and off – they’re merging into one.

It’s easy to understand the value and attraction of a site like Yelp, but why did they flourish while other local review sites floundered? It’s a good question, and one that has been asked by Zhongmin Wang of Northwestern University, who recently published a study on the subject (its contents are nicely summarized in this article by Matt McGee). Wang’s thesis is that Yelp successfully emphasized the communal aspect of local search, and, in Wang’s words, "encourag[ed] reviewers to establish a social image or reputation." This concept, so crucial to social networking, seems to have been ignored by rivals like Yahoo! Local and Citysearch, where the reviews were often anonymous and devoid of context. By giving its users incentive to create profiles, share photos and videos and chat with each other, Yelp became a place to be and not just a place to dump an anonymous complaint about a burger.

Anonymity seems to be one of the biggest things holding back the competition. As the Internet has made very clear, everyone has an opinion, and who cares what someone without a name or face says about a burger? Why read it? You’ve tasted the burger and liked it, but why bother sharing that fact? You’re tossing a pebble in a gray ocean. Yelp has been successful because it discourages anonymity; users are prompted to create a profile before they can write a sentence, and the site places great value on initiating "real-life" interaction through coordinated events and meet-ups with other members.

Wang’s study is interesting to consider in the context of People Search websites like Spokeo. While you can’t review a burger on Spokeo, you can connect with people. We are always working hard to integrate different strands of data (i.e. information from Name Search, Email Search, Phone Search and Username Search) into a more fully-formed whole.The difference between "virtual" and "real life" identity will continue to blur as new technologies and websites provide us with better ways to communicate and share information in a meaningful way; if I may borrow a metaphor from The Wizard of Oz, this kind of meaningful communication isn’t possible by being a faceless voice behind the screen.

•  Hedgehogs earned their name from their pig-like snout and grunt, along with the fact that they frequent hedges and undergrowth in search of food. (National Geographic)

•  Hedgehogs are generally nocturnal. (Wildlife Trust)

•  A typical hedgehog’s diet consists of slugs, snails, worms, centipedes, toads and frogs, berries, roots, mushrooms and delicious, delicious snakes. This makes them a popular pet with gardeners looking to combat pests. They love cilantro, too.  (National Geographic)

•  There are 17 species of hedgehogs. They are members of the Erinaceidae family, along gymnures and moonrats. (Wikipedia)

•  Unlike the hedgehog in our logo, hedgehogs are not blue. Sure, you could spray paint one blue, but please don’t. Hedgehogs hate being spray-painted, and will attempt to eat your face when you do so. (Personal research)

•  The hedgehog has been around for about 15 million years, making it one of the oldest mammals on Earth.  (A to Z Animals)

•  The hedgehog has a bizarre and mysterious behavior called "annointing." Here’s one expert’s description: Anointing is a possible response that a hedgehog will exhibit when they encounter a smell that they are unfamiliar with. In such an event the hedgehog will possibly bite or chew at the source of the smell, then they will froth at mouth to create a lather. Next they will deposit their foamy saliva on their quills by contorting their bodies. I have seen a many a hedgehog contort their bodies until they fall over, some become so entranced that they become unaware of their surroundings at the time. And people call me a weirdo when I do this. Hypocrites! (Hedgehog Central)

•  Hedgehogs are fast runners, skillful climbers and fine swimmers. (I hate running, can’t climb, and never learned how to swim. Hedgehogs + 1.) (Wikipedia)

•  There are nearly 20 different species of hedgehog, ranging from the tiny, oh-so-cute Long-eared Hedgehog, to the larger European hedgehog. Please refer to the helpful genius at Answers.com if you’d like to know the largest species of hedgehog. (Wikipedia/Answers.com)

•  The average hedgehog has anywhere from 5,000 to 6,500 quills. Although the quills aren’t poisonous, they are sharp; they are used as a defense mechanism: when the hedgehog is threatened, it rolls itself into a sharp ballm as no one likes to eat sharp things. (Wikipedia)

In summary: hedgehogs are awesome.