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.

Remember when you first googled yourself? You didn’t know want to expect, but you’ll have to admit that it was pretty darn cool to see yourself as a result.  You were, in fact, someone who Goggle felt important enough to index and share to the world. But after you goggled yourself (and of course others) you came to realize that there wasn’t much to it. Googling yourself and others became boring. There was no excitement in finding out what you likely already knew about yourself and others: college attended, a photo here or there, company employment roster, formerly authored school report, etc.

Where was all the "good stuff?"

The "good stuff" was being mined by people search companies like Spokeo People Search. Today, companies like this allow users to simply import their email contacts and obtain deep, comprehensive results. Full of photos, videos, blogs, and shopping lists, Spokeo People Search gives you true insight into someone’s lifestyle without jeopardizing privacy norms.  Check it out on Spokeo.com.

In essence, search has changed. Googling yourself and others has evolved into a specialized people search.

The great Benjamin Disraeli once said "Change is inevitable. Change is constant."  Searching yourself and others will never quite be the same.

As the need to find people becomes ever more common, people are associating Spokeo with People Search. A great example of this can be seen in a recent article published by the Wall Street Journal.

Simply stated by its author:

Spokeo.com is a search site operated by Spokeo Inc., a startup that lets users see what their friends are doing on other Web sites.

The best-selling financial newspaper in America mentions a few other people search technologies before wrapping up with:

Ruth Funabiki, a 57-year-old law librarian in Moscow, Idaho, recently discovered through Spokeo that a friend added something unusual to her wish list on Amazon.com: one of those disposable pads that protects mattresses from bedwetters. "There’s a voyeuristic aspect to it," she says. "I’m embarrassed. I shouldn’t be looking."

Spokeo is the only search engine to reveal this amount of detail. We are changing the nature of people search and turning it int o a much more personal experience. Previously, people search was only used by background checks companies and law enforcement. Now it is a tool for everyone.

Yahoo! People Search may appear to be the best choice for searching people given its brand power, however finding information about people is more than just displaying an address and a phone number. When you’re searching for someone you want more than cold, impersonal data; you want personal photos, videos, and blogs.

Well, look no further! Spokeo people search investigates deeper than any other search engine to show you what people have posted on the Web.  With Spokeo, we’ll search that person down even if they’re using the username "hotgirl69."  So go ahead and search people to see what you can find. We guarantee that you’ll be shocked.

I know everyone has heard of Craigslist since it is the place to find any bargain imaginable. If fact, to be quite honest, I purchased my current vehicle on the site some years back (Boy, did I get a sweet deal). But whatever your reason may be for surfing Craigslist, be it deals or dating, one thing is certain: you’ll have to meet the person face-to-face to finalize the transaction.

Well, if you’re like me, you’ll want to know a bit more about someone before meeting up at 9:45pm in a grocery store parking lot to buy a 32GB Ipod Touch. So why not learn something more through people search? Why not research this person online to make sure it’s someone you want to do business with?

Or for dating purposes, why not make sure this person has a clean MySpace page?

Well, with Spokeo people search it’s a done deal. Spokeo is designed to work with only an email address.

Remember, life is too valuable to meet up with complete strangers! So search people and be safe!

A lot of your friends don’t blog or upload photos regularly, but they actively maintain their profiles. From now on, you can track these profile changes on Spokeo. Whenever your friends update their info or share slideshow, you will know it right away.

This is a feature requested by our users a month ago, and now it’s done! Although we only got six people here, we do read everyone’s feedback. Sometimes we cannot fulfill user requests as fast as we’d like to, but we will always try our best.

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.

Whenever I introduce Spokeo to my friends, their first reactions are always "Wow!", then "Hm … this is a little scary", then "This is freaking cool!". After saying those three things, they’ll just ignore my existence and start checking out their friends’ content.

You probably thought the same things, too.

Even though I designed this website, Spokeo still impresses me by how much stuff it finds. It shows me how active my friends are on the Web as well as how mainstream social networks truly are. Before using Spokeo, I thought only a handful of my friends used social networks. Now I see that everyone, young or old, is part of this revolution. The Internet has quietly transcended from a network of computers to a web of interconnected people.

The funny thing is that this data was publicly available to you and others for a long time. While Spokeo appears to know everything, it actually only finds publicly available information on the Internet (which explains why some of you reported that Spokeo failed to find couple of your friends – Spokeo does not find private information). Of course, no one is diligent enough to go through 30+ social networks to find and track their friends. This is why you need Spokeo to automate that process for you.

As much as I enjoy people hyping Spokeo, I feel responsible to demystify its capability. Spokeo is not a super-machine that mysteriously knows what everyone is doing. It is just a system that automates what was previously tedious. Spokeo facilitates the flow of information and presents it in an organized fashion.

Now that you understand the mechanics of Spokeo, do you still find it scary? Personally, I still do feel a bit overwhelmed, not by Spokeo, but by the sheer number of my friends’ posts. We have entered a new age in which people feel more comfortable and compelled to share their information. It’s a irreversible trend, and it entails exciting new possibilities

Techcrunch (a very influential Tech blog) profiled FriendFeed today and mentioned Spokeo as a competitor. I am not sure what FriendFeed does since it is still in private beta. I would however, like to clarify Spokeo’s value proposition as a friend tracker, and what makes it different from other social network aggregators.

There are already thousands of social networks, and the number keeps increasing. As pioneered by Spokeo back in Nov 2006, people are beginning to build tools that organize this plethora of social media. These tools are loosely categorized by bloggers as "social network aggregators"; however, they all have different approaches and purposes.

Most of these tools are "profile aggregators", such as ProfileLinker, ProfileBuilder, and Profilactic. They let you aggregate different profiles from the social networks you use, manage them in a dashboard, and share these identities through an embeddable widget. In other words, these profile aggregators let you consolidate and show all your online identities.

A couple aggregators have attempted to build social networks around these consolidated identities, such as SocialURL and MyLifeBrand. Now you can message, leave comments, share links, and interact with members in the same community. Basically, they are building social networks on top of existing social networks.

The list of social network aggregators doesn’t stop here. Fuser (I personally use this service) consolidates your messaging accounts from Yahoo, Gmail, MySpace, and Facebook. Spock, Wink, and YoName let you search friends from different social networks. As people spend more time online, they will need tools to help them organize their online social life. Consequently, we will see more social network aggregators popping up.

Now, how does Spokeo differ from these services? Spokeo is a specialized friend tracker that tells you what your friends are doing on the Web. We are not about managing profiles, or socializing with other members, or consolidating all of your different accounts. On Spokeo, you see your friends’ latest updates, and then you are immediately led to the original sites to interact with them. You can’t network on Spokeo, we don’t want you to.

Why? We believe that reading should be separate from social interactions. Most of time, we just want to read about what’s going on in our circles. We don’t want to be bothered by all the friend requests, messages, and wall comments. As an analogy, when you want to read a book or newspaper, would you rather be in your living room or in a night club? I guess some of you can sit still and read a book while cute girls or guys are dancing around you, but most of us want a little privacy. By keeping the social elements out, Spokeo provides an exclusive, private, and safe environment for you to browse your friends’ latest blogs, photos, and videos.

Lastly, a Techcrunch’s reader commented on what was the use of these social network aggregators, since she and her friends only use Facebook. Well, my answer is, IF she has friends elsewhere, she needs Spokeo. That is a big IF (hence capitalized), but we are working on a secret functionality (launching in a week) that will make the IF statement into a definite one. How are we going to do it? Well, I will keep my mouth shut for now; after all, it’s a secret