Today a new reality is slowly emerging which could hardly be anticipated when Spokeo first began.  All of us – innovators and users alike – are slowly becoming aware that aggregating multiple public profiles and consolidating them into one seems to give birth to yet a whole new identity heretofore unrecognized. This is, in essence, the new gestalt of virtual identity – an identity that is sometimes greater than the sum of its parts. Some find this “new” identity disturbing, while – happily – many more do not.  They recognize that it is simply a natural corollary of the information age and people-search aggregation.

The Web is becoming more open and connected with each passing day.  In the late 90s, posting photos online was almost inconceivable. Today it is the norm.  A few years ago, sharing what you were doing or where you were in real time was unimaginable. Today services like Twitter and Foursquare are all the rage.  These cultural changes have new privacy implications, and technologies like Spokeo are helping to reveal and shape new norms.

We’ve been listening to people’s feedback closely, and have been implementing many changes, even amidst the big technical challenges we have faced from the sudden traffic surge to our site. Spokeo has declared its ground-breaking objective to be the first data aggregator ever to offer users some measure of control over the public information that is published about them. We are now working feverishly to deliver upon that objective, and hope to unveil our new privacy controls within the year.  

Many have heard our pioneering message, and are waiting expectantly to see what we can achieve.  Others remain at odds with the existence of people search as a whole, and would rather we simply disappear. We are not politicians, nor philosophers. We are just engineers.  The truth is, we do not spend a lot of time discussing problems. We prefer a hands-on approach to solving them.  While it’s impossible to make everyone happy, one thing I do promise:  We intend to keep trying our very best.  Thanks to all of our loyal users for your patience. The best is yet to come.

Harrison Tang, President

Upon the release of Spokeo 4 in early March of this year, a surprising controversy sprang up among the blog communities and media. Our new product unexpectedly seemed to strike a nerve in some, eliciting powerful and sometimes harsh responses. Suddenly we were the focus of overwhelming attention. There was much misplaced trepidation, and startling things were being said about us.  We were flooded with demands for interviews — assailed with piercing questions, followed by a seemingly endless stream of often one-sided commentaries and hard-lined news stories, many of which were less reliable than we could have imagined.  

Throughout this maelstrom, however, we somehow managed to resist the temptation to dive into the fray. While the impulse to defend ourselves and shed light on the many half-truths was compelling, we did not wish to engage in any caustic back-and-forths, or verbal skirmishes. It is simply not what we are about. Instead we decided to concentrate our energies on what we are about – namely creativity and development.  

Spokeo’s chief aim was, and remains, to create great products. Simply put, our heart is in innovation. We are committed to cutting-edge design and ingenuity, and recognize that developing great products entails healthy and sometimes vigorous debate. We pay close attention to any feedback we receive, good or bad, because we know that doing so stimulates great ideas. And indeed, in many ways our willingness to integrate and respond to criticism is what has shaped and molded our products into what they are today.  Now that some of the recent controversy has quieted down, however, I would like to take this opportunity to reflect upon everything that has transpired in recent months, and present another side of the story as well.  

I think most hi-tech innovators would agree that every new technology suffers labor pains. New products undergo many metamorphoses and lifecycles, and frequently endure multiple phases of adjustment and fine-tuning before they assume their true form.  Spokeo is no different. Ours is a new data-aggregation technology. It has revolutionized the realm of people-search and made it what it is today. In 2006, we invented the concept of social-network aggregation.  In 2008, we popularized social-search technology, and today people search stands at a whole new level. But this kind of innovation does not come without a few challenges along the way.  

Spokeo has always strived to push and test the limits of technology, as is evident in our track record of innovation. Perhaps more important, however, we have also discovered that, sometimes when we test the limits of technology, we also test people and their threshold for change.

We are forever examining, reassessing, and fine tuning our products. While we in no way revel in controversy, we have come to accept it as an inevitable part of the innovation process.  Like any new-product innovator at the cutting edge, we make mistakes, and will inevitably continue to do so.  It is simply par for the course. We will also, on occasion, probably unintentionally upset some, while hopefully pleasing a great many more. No matter how controversial we may be, however, what we do promise is to continue to listen to all factions — fans and critics alike.

Harrison Tang, President

For those of you who may not have heard, The Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) – a non-profit public interest group that, interestingly, bills itself as “working to keep the Internet open, innovative, and free”– filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) last week, alleging that Spokeo’s practices violate the Fair Credit Reporting Act, and Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act.

In its complaint CDT made some rather startling allegations that confounded both mainstream users and techies alike. In fact, most of us were simply left scratching our heads in bewilderment, exclaiming “Huh? Are these guys for real? How do they even come up with this stuff?”

Now, we should say that we believe wholeheartedly in a healthy exchange of ideas. In fact, we applaud advocacy and recognize that watchdogs play an important role in society. They are a necessary component that helps keep everyone in check. But, a healthy system of checks and balances is a bit different from a misleading and unjustified complaint filed with federal regulators that, for all intents and purposes, threatens to suck the life out of entrepreneurship, innovation, and free enterprise, wouldn’t you agree?

We understand that CDT is interested in protecting privacy.  And that’s not a bad thing.  In fact, we’re all for it. So long as it’s in sync with the twenty-first century. Still, we think that even when you have a cause that’s near and dear to your heart, it is important to dot your “i”s and cross your “t”s  before you go making damaging allegations – especially ones that we know to be untrue.

CDT’s complaint is, to put it mildly, royally off mark. To clarify just how off mark, let’s take a look at the basis of its claim: In its complaint CDT asserts that Spokeo violates the Fair Credit Reporting Act because Spokeo offers detailed “consumer profiles” and then encourages employers to use these profiles to evaluate potential hires. Further, they allege, Spokeo violates Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act, because Spokeo guarantees credit and wealth assessments for “all” individuals – in particular, “information about the consumer’s mortgage, income, and investments” –  just for purposes of luring consumers to sign up for paid services, but then “never” delivers “any” of that information.

Spokeo offers detailed consumer profiles? That’s interesting. It sure comes as news to us. Last we checked, we were a search engine, not a credit bureau. OK, so let’s stop pussyfooting around and look at what’s really going on here. The reality is, CDT knows that to regulate Spokeo the way they would like to – in other words, to put us out of business — they must first meet certain threshold criteria that would make Spokeo subject to the Fair Credit Reporting Act.  First on that list is, they must establish that Spokeo generates consumer reports. Then they must show that Spokeo encourages employers to rely on those reports for hiring decisions. 

The problem they face meeting that threshold is twofold:  First, Spokeo simply does not generate consumer reports. Try as they may to repackage the data Spokeo aggregates, and re-characterize it as “consumer reports,” CDT simply cannot. Calling an orange a grapefruit still does not make it so, no matter how hard you try to make it look like one.

Spokeo does not aggregate any secure or private information such as Social-Security numbers, driver’s license numbers, bank accounts, or credit scores. Moreover, we do not draw conclusions about the public records we do aggregate. Any wealth indices displayed on our site are already published and obtainable. These are merely widespread marketing summaries of the ilk that advertisers have been relying upon for decades. Spokeo was and remains a search engine. Much like Google we simply aggregate already published, public records, many of which have been in existence for a very long time.

Second, Spokeo does not encourage employers to rely on any of the data we aggregate for any purpose, much less for purposes of making employment decisions.  Here, again, CDT’s complaint is baseless, and frankly, reckless.

A little history: Since our inception, there have been several iterations of the Spokeo product.  Spokeo 3 was strictly a social-network people-search product.  It performed people search across numerous social networks, and offered users a way to keep up with friends and contacts across those networks more efficiently. That version of the product included no additional, external published sources. Hence, if a human resources professional who was already using social networks like MySpace or Facebook to research an employee simply wanted to do so more quickly, Spokeo’s search engine simply provided them with a more efficient and perfectly legitimate mechanism by which to do so.

Since the introduction of Spokeo 4 in March 2010, which added other published-data sources and functions, to avoid the possibility of any misuse or confusion, Spokeo expressly ceased to promote its new product for any human resource purposes. At present, we in no way endorse or encourage such uses, nor do we plan to do so in the future.  Further, Spokeo repeatedly states across the site that any information it aggregates is only as accurate as the published information it is derived from, that the information cannot be guaranteed for accuracy, and should therefore only be used as a reference. Perhaps if CDT had bothered to research things more carefully before launching into its tirade, it would have realized that there were two distinct products with separate life cycles, and both Spokeo and taxpayers could have been spared the unnecessary cost of a frivolous complaint.

With regards to CDT’s second claim that Spokeo violates Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act because it guarantees credit and wealth assessments for “all” individuals, specifically “information about the consumer’s mortgage, income, and investments,” all just for purposes of luring consumers to sign up for paid services, and then “never” delivers “any” of that information — the claim is not only baseless, but frankly borders on the defamatory and libelous.  Again guys, how ‘bout next time before you go making such outlandish allegations you try some due diligence first?

Before anyone purchases any service Spokeo offers, Spokeo states in no uncertain terms that the information available “may” include…and then goes on to provide a full list of what the search may offer.  Spokeo never promises to provide all of the information in every search. It cannot because information is not static. It varies from person to person. People are different, and not every person has the same types or quantities of data published about them.

As for specific “information about mortgage, income, and investments” – those fields are offered as part of the business premium product only. Hence, a free search will not yield this information. Again, maybe if CDT had bothered to explore Spokeo’s product line more thoroughly, it would have noted this distinction. Once more, however, for the reason indicated above, even within the business premium package Spokeo can never guarantee that all of this information will come through in every search. Information will always vary among searches due to the varying availability of published records on any given individual.

It is noteworthy that as of the date of this writing, however, 89.8% of searches on the business premium product have yielded “estimated income.” Economic Health measures, offered as part of the regular premium product, yielded results in 65% of the searches, and Wealth Level fields yielded information in 69% of searches.  Given these statistics, how CDT arrived at “never” sure beats us.

More glaringly, CDT never bothers to mention that our paid products offer not only the potential for yielding more data, but provide extra search avenues as well. Under the premium product one can perform reverse e-mail search, phone search, and even upload a contact address book and follow friends across social networks. How CDT could ignore all of that and flagrantly claim that you get nothing for your money is beyond us. 

Fortunately, as evidenced by the millions of searches performed on Spokeo every month, it seems most users clearly disagree with CDT’s claims, and value our products and service.  We thank all of our users for their continued support and remain committed to improving upon, and developing even greater products in the future.

When we use Google Maps, we can see our own house, but we probably don’t mind that other people can see it, too.  When we flip through a Whitepages directory, we can find people’s phone numbers and addresses, are we are fine with it since Whitepages directories have been delivered to our homes for decades.  So why then, when we use Spokeo, are we surprised by how much it reveals about us?

Because we’ve never seen anything like Spokeo before.  People are skeptical about new technologies that break existing perceptions.  When search engines came out in late 90’s, people were concerned about the ease in which others could discover their personal websites.  When social networks came out in 2002, people were hesitant to post their personal pictures online.  Every time  a new technology brings people closer together, new privacy implications emerge.

Spokeo aggregates publicly available information.  It’s not the "magic" that some people believe it is, but rather, it’s just an aggregation technology that organizes scattered public information in a way that has never been done before.  Many people believe in a concept called "privacy by obscurity", which argues that public information is private if you don’t know how to find it.  This concept is flawed, however, because the fact you, yourself don’t know how to find such information does not mean that other people are equally clueless.  What Spokeo does is something that many marketing and investigative firms have done for years and years, so this information has been available for quite some time, just without your knowledge!  Spokeo automates the traditionally laborious data aggregation and analysis, making information available to everyone

Spokeo respects your privacy, and we want to make it easy for you to opt-out of Spokeo search results at any time.  If you don’t feel comfortable about your information on Spokeo, you can go to our Privacy page to opt-out right away.  Please note that to prevent abuse, we have implemented several algorithmic checks to make sure that you are only opting out yourself – not our entire database.  Also note that opting out of Spokeo does not remove your public information on other websites.  If you encounter problems, please email privacy[AT]spokeo[DOT]com.

The current Spokeo 4.0 launched only a couple weeks ago, so we are still improving our site based on user input.  Recently we discovered that our abuse-prevention algorithm might be too restrictive, and now we are busy working on a solution to better meet people’s needs.  Building something new does not have the benefit of learning from others’ past experiences; as a result, it requires iterations after iterations of user feedback and adjustment.  We will not slack off though as we are committed to building the best people search engine ever.

As most of you would agree, the Web 2.0 era is long over.  Web 2.0 was categorized by ad-based business models.  Everything has to be free, and advertisers would somehow pay the bills.  We entrepreneurs chased after user counts, and the ad dollars were assumed to flow in.

We started Spokeo with the standard "Google AdSense" ad model.  We thought that if we’ve built something cool that people like, we would earn enough to cover our operations and someone would buy us out.  This sounds naive, but that’s what we were dreaming, and I bet that’s what every TechCrunch reader was thinking back in 2006.

The pursuit of user counts works fine if the ad CPM (cost per thousand impressions) stays at the 2005 level.  Back then, advertisers hadn’t figured out that user-generated content converts poorly into sales, so these advertisers paid more for the benefits of the doubt.  Take Google as an example.  Google paid MySpace $900 million dollars in 2006 to take care of MySpace’s ad inventory, and all Google got in return is the lesson that user-generated content doesn’t monetize.  Advertisers aren’t dumb, and they won’t pay for ads that don’t work forever.  CPM for user-generated content took a nose dive around 2007, and all Web 2.0 sites with ad-driven business models were affected.

Spokeo cannot escape this fallout.  We ran ads for 3 months in the beginning of 2008, and we quickly realized that even if we grow the traffic by 100 times, we still couldn’t cover our basic costs.  Facing the hard reality, we made one of the biggest business decisions by turning Spokeo into a premium service.  It’s a last-ditched effort to save our business, and we didn’t know what to expect.  Fortunately, there were many people who like Spokeo to pay a little to support us, and now we should be able to weather through this economic downturn. 

Here we would like to thank all of our users for supporting us, and we would continue to introduce new and innovative products in the near future.  We got something huge scheduled for January 2009 (big projects always take time), so stay tuned!

Yesterday I had the opportunity to meet some interesting new start-ups and demo Spokeo at the Plug and Play Expo in Sunnyvale. Plug and Play’s Expo is hosted twice a year to give up and coming start-ups a chance to gain exposure for their products or services.

It was nice opportunity to get out of the office and talk about Spokeo. The overall response to our service was very positive and I gathered valuable feedback from other participants at the expo. Spokeo’s table was between two very different start-ups, one focused on user generated content and the second focused on limiting access to content. Collegewikis.com and ScreenerKey. Collegewikis enables students to share their notes online. Similar to wikipedia the notes are editable so students can add to the body of information about a class or a lecture. ScreenKey was a tool for parents to monitor the amount of time their children watched television everyday, when the alloted time for TV viewing is over the device will start to emit a audible alarm. The spirit of innovation is alive and well in the Silicon Valley.

I hear that question all the time. And I have finally made my peace with it. User growth is good. However, obsessing over user growth in a product under development is bad because it breeds unhealthy stress and leads to shortsighted decisions.

I read an interesting interview from Eric Schmidt months ago. In it, he mentioned that early on, Google deemphasized user growth. If Google was making noticeable improvements in its product month to month, why should Google go for users today? Why not grab them more easily at a later point?

I am adopting a similar mindset with Spokeo. We planned two major features today, both of which will greatly improve Spokeo in the future. I see growth as much more natural with each successive Spokeo release. The market is not closing up anytime soon, and we have no external pressure, so why not maintain a product focus? As the saying goes, the product is the marketing. As proof, our conversion rate increased 3x when we released our new skin yesterday.

Once again, user growth is still good for all the obvious reasons. We still need to get the word out. We just can’t benchmark ourselves against all the typical success stories when our product is unfinished.

There’s a proverb, "Birds of a feather flock together" (Chinese has a similar proverb, "one takes on the color of one’s company"). When you see many of your friends have started their own ventures, you’ll feel an inexplicable urge to do the same as well. These friends are more than drinking buddies; rather, we exchange ideas and experiences to help each other grow. Here I would like to introduce one of Spokeo’s friends – Midomi.

Midomi is a karaoke social network. You can sing, and others can comment on your performance. They got a lot of nice people in their community, so even if you are not pro, you won’t get trashed. My performance is here (you can add it into Spokeo to track my future performances). Warning: I like Chinese pop music so you probably can’t understand what I am singing. Also I am not exactly pro. Anyway, if you are interested to see how Midomi works, or if you find it entertaining to see what my voice is like, go check it out.

Midomi is more than a social network. It is also a voice search engine. Just sing a song like "Happy Birthday" into Midomi, and it can correctly find that song in seconds. The accuracy is quite astounding, so you should definitely check out that unique feature.

How Midomi’s search works is that it can recognize "pitch" (as opposed to speech). It does not attempt to interpret what people are saying; however, by focusing on pitch recognition, their engine can detect the melody better. Obviously I am not an expert on this subject. Just try it out, and you’ll know what I mean.

Lastly, we are going to upgrade our system tomorrow. You’ll experience a short downtime, but you’ll appreciate the new changes.

If you happened to check out our company page today, you’d notice that Spokeo got a great marketing boost in Mital. She is very lively, a fireball of energy, a human Mount Vesuvius. She is exactly what we are not, so it’s a great fit, and we’re super excited that she is with us. A very small aside: HARRISON YOU BROKE THE ABOUT PAGE AGAIN.

Taking a step back, I now see that we have hired the same way for all three very different positions. It has taken me a while to internalize our hiring philosophy to the point where I can actually verbalize it.

Our hiring philosophy errs towards false negatives. By definition, a startup is an underdog for its first few years. What we lack in resources, reach, and an established user base we must make up in A players. Our leverage resides solely in the people we have.

We also only hire when we are in pain. When in pain, we know exactly what we are hiring for. When in pain, we know we are acquiring a resource that will be efficiently utilized. The downside is that our new hires hit the ground running. And they run fast.

Fundamentally, a clash exists between false negatives and hiring in pain. The first quality tells you to take your time shopping, while the second creates a situation where you really don’t want to take your time. Alas, the joys of a startup.

Ten rules is a wonderful post for startups written by a great web entrepreneur. I’ve read it many times and even taped it to my wall, but I am still not happy with our performance on several rules. I only present the rules here. Please refer back to the original post for descriptions of each rule.

1: Be Narrow
Fail.

Our main message is ‘Track Your Friends’ (which will be more apparent in future releases). At first, it seemed narrow enough, but now some questions need answers. Track all your friends and grant continued account access to Spokeo? Track only your public friends?

As a startup, we also can’t support every service under the sun. Track friends across the major social networks? Track friends across every [blog or photo or video or music] network in [some category]?

2: Be Different
Pass.

Oh, yes. Very different. Makes life difficult at first.

3: Be Casual
Pass.

4: Be Picky
Pass.

We have increased our pickiness across the board.

Pickiness is a lesson that cannot be learned in a general sense. Trained as engineers, we knew from the beginning how to be picky in engineering and technical recruiting. However, engineers are probably least picky when it comes to features and abiding by rule 1. Engineers tend to want to build a lot of stuff.

5: Be User-Centric
Pass.

We completely obsess over UI. In fact, our skin is getting optimized even further as I type.

6: Be Self-Centered
Pass.

We are finally all users of our own software. I, myself, didn’t find Spokeo attractive enough until a month ago. That was a big confidence booster for me.

7: Be Greedy
Not sure I agree with this rule.

8: Be Tiny
Pass.

Rule 4 enforces this rule.

9: Be Agile
Pass.

10: Be Balanced
Fail

Some of us are more balanced than others. I tend to have spurts where I live work, eat work, pester co-workers about work after work, and even dream work! They tend to happen when Spokeo enters a critical phase.

Overall Grade
We passed 7 rules, failed 2 rules, and punted on 1 rule. Normally that would be a 70%, but since rule 1 is so important, I give Spokeo a 50%.