We usually get food delivered to the office every week.

We had some delicious Chinese food today and now we’re all comatose.

Happy Friday everyone!

Photo Credit: Amanda Cardenas

 PS: Follow us on Twitter!

Hey Bloggers! I know that you guys really love hearing about the trials and triumphs of our chairs, so I thought I’d share some more information about all of the exciting chair happenings in the office. I left off explaining how we had ordered new chairs that nobody ended up liking, except me, which turned out to be almost impossible to take apart for the return. We managed to do it though, and received our new chairs this week (documented below).

The evolution of our office chairs.

Hopefully the new chairs will satisfy everybody… We shall see.

Cheers,

Katie

P.S. Find us on Facebook!

Hey bloggers! No, we did not get new red staplers, but something else exciting happened in the office. As I was posting last week’s blog about the new office chairs, I noticed the guys rolling the new chairs into the main room. It turns out that nobody likes the new chairs (except for me) and that they’re returning them for different ones. We then spent the next hour trying to disassemble the chairs, which, let me tell you, is easier said than done. We were having such a difficult time taking the chairs apart, we ended up calling the manufacturing company for help. They emailed us help videos (a sign that we are not the only ones who have had problems), which show middle-aged woman in heels disassembling the chairs with quickness and ease. It was more hilarious than helpful, but they assisted in getting the job done.

The moral of the story: make sure you really like an office chair before purchasing it, because taking it apart is not cool.

Cheers,

Katie

P.S. Join us on Facebook!

Hey bloggers! How are all you fine people doing? Spokeo is doing quite well, and is continuing to prepare for the launch of Spokeo 4. For instance, we upgraded all of our office chairs the other day. There is nothing like a new office chair! It’s very exciting, I know. I completely understand if you’re finding it difficult to restrain the urge to jump up in the air and do a heel click.

In other news, I definitely just wrote a blog about office chairs. However, I assure you that there will be much more titillating and exhilarating news to come (perhaps we will be getting new, red staplers next week…?). We are in the calm before the storm, the storm being Spokeo 4.

=

I would also like to inform everybody that you can donate to Haiti by texting "HAITI" to 90999. Haiti is in our thoughts, and any action or contribution, no matter how small, counts.

Cheers,

Katie

P.S. Join us on Facebook!

Hey Bloggers!

As I  mentioned in my previous blog, Spokeo has recently relocated and inhabited a new office. The office is currently pretty austere, but there is one thing that adds some character to the place, being the ping pong table! The ping pong table completely dominates the office, standing front and center of our main room. It was definitely the first thing I noticed when I first stepped foot inside the office, and it also gave me a strange, reassuring feeling that I would definitely get along with everyone here.

(The photo is of two of our engineers battling it out!)

Good ol’ Wikipedia has a list of fun facts about ping pong, which I pasted below for your reading pleasure:

*Multi-talented sportsman Max Woosnam, an Olympic and Wimbledon champion at lawn tennis and one-time captain of the England National football team, once defeated actor and film director Charlie Chaplin at table tennis while playing with a butter knife instead of a racket.

*Table tennis inspired the first commercially successful video game, Pong.

*In the early 1970s the People’s Republic of China (PRC) invited American table tennis players to a tournament in the PRC. This marked a thawing in relations with the United States that was followed up by a visit by U.S. president Richard Nixon. The popular media therefore dubbed this visit "Ping Pong Diplomacy".

*At the 1936 World Championships contested in Prague, two defensive players took over an hour to contest one point.The entire match lasted over four hours.

*A man in Hawaii has invented a three-player table for table tennis, calling it Tri-Pong.

*Comedian George Carlin once noted in a stand-up routine that all racquet sports are derivatives of Ping Pong: for instance, tennis is "Ping Pong played while standing on the table."

Interesting, no? Well, I thought so. Anyway, I enjoy that Spokeo’s main piece of "furniture" is our ping pong table, and just like a game of ping pong, Spokeo is focused, bounding ideas off of each other and quickly approaching the launch of Spokeo 4. Go Team!

Cheers,

Katie

Food is important at Spokeo. Our highly-developed eating habits are at the core of Spokeo culture. Normally we don’t have any cake in the fridge, but Mike’s mom sent him quite a large double chocolate cake. 

Spokey is our beloved hedgehog. We originally wanted a person to represent the Spokeo spirit, similar to what Tom Anderson did for MySpace. However, we are all a bit camera-shy, so we decided to create a cartoon character. One of our friends suggested that a hedghog’s spikes could represent the hub-and-spoke nature of a friendship network. We all liked the idea, and Spokey was born.

Like all of us, Spokey has gone through a lot of change in the last twelve months. Here are some photos of Spokey:

Spokey’s passport shot

Spokey’s old look

Spokey trying to look cool

Spokey and his band

We all love Spokey. Do you? If you have any suggestions for Spokey’s next look, please send your drawings and drafts to us. With Spokey’s approval, we will incorporate the suggestion into a future skin.

A lot of our users and friends have asked this question, so I’ll tell the story here (thank you, Alfa, for reminding me to write about this). Spokeo sounds as random as other websites like Bebo, Meebo, Google, … That said, we didn’t decide it over a drinking party. In fact, we’ve spent two weeks to name our project.

From the very beginning, we want a name that’s consistent with our web address. We don’t want to be in Nissan’s situation, where they have to use "www.nissanusa.com" for their site, as opposed to "www.nissan.com". The web address is the heart and soul of a website (Do you think Facebook can be this popular if it’s called "Xpci"?), so we want a name that’s short, meaningful, and easy-to-remember.

If you haven’t noticed, all the meaningful names are taken on the Web. Addresses like Business.com and Wiki.com worth several millions (there is a huge business for just trading these web addresses). Also, you cannot find any name shorter than two syllables, even if it sounds terrible and means nothing. Go to http://www.register.com, type in any word on your mind, and you’ll know what I am talking about here.

We didn’t have thousands of dollars to buy a meaningful domain (we still don’t), and honestly, we didn’t really know what we are going to build at that time. We only have a vision – to automate the way we connect with friends. We see people’s social graphs as hubs-and-spokes; unfortunately, both "www.hub.com" and "www.spoke.com" are taken. After pronouncing "hub" and "spoke" over and over again, Ray decided that "spoke" sounds better. Subsequently, we started appending different letters and words after the word "spoke". We eventually limited our choices to "Spokeo" and "Spokea", and we chose "Spokeo" because "O" looks like a friendship circle.

In sum, Spokeo signifies friendships and circles. Although there are a lot of social networks out there, we believe that there is still a lot to be done, especially in the area of automatically managing your growing online friendships. We haven’t reached our goal yet; after all, I think a lot of you are still confused about what Spokeo does. We will try harder to make Spokeo even simpler and more convenient to use.

Now you will wonder, why the hedgehog? I have written a lot for today, so I will leave the story of our mascot for next week. In the meantime, you can guess the name of that hegehog (yes, he does have a name). If you guess it right, we will mail you a small, secret gift to your house.

One way I shirk work is by buying snacks for the company. That’s right, the lazier I get, the more snacks everyone has to eat, so my laziness isn’t such a bad thing . Feeding time is indeed glorious. I like to dump the snacks and watch the procession.

The scout has a keen nose for foraging.

Another critter picks up on the trail and wants his fair share too!

This beast establishes himself as king of the foodpile.

A third critter dances in from the left. The first critter strikes key alliances with FudgeStick offerings.

One critter likes to eat sheltered in a cave.

Chomp chomp chomp.

I’m the guy who fixes blogs, photos, videos, and music not display correctly. As it turns out, one of our users emailed that an X-rated blog he follows wasn’t displaying correctly. Do I help the user and improve our software despite the content? Guests and investors do walk in sometimes, and getting “caught” would indeed be very awkward. “Gasp, Ray’s looking at Pr0nZ!”