Nowadays, you don’t have to venture far to discover that the latest technologies are widely available among many people. Anytime a telephone rings in a crowd, everyone commences to check, then pull out, their latest smartphone. Whether it’s a Blackberry, Sidekick, Palm, Droid, I-Phone, or any of the diverse models available on the market today, the smartphone has become a commonplace feature of our modern landscape.

Today’s smartphones really are smart! Some of the features that come standard include email, Internet browsing, fully functioning operating systems, GPS, camera/video capability, organizers, calendars, full keyboards, mp3 players, games, and hundreds of other applications.

While many people are familiar with a smartphone’s seemingly endless uses, a lesser known fact is that smartphones have been around since the early 1990s. The first smartphone on the market was called Simon. Designed by IBM and shown at a Las Vegas computer industry trade show in 1992, it was then sold to the public by Bellsouth in 1993. Simon weighed over a pound and retailed for $900 in 1993 – to give you an idea, $900 in the 90s is the same as $1300 today!

simon in its charging dock

Much like today’s smartphones, Simon was a mobile phone with many features such as a calendar, address book, world clock, calculator, note pad, e-mail, fax capabilities, and games. Also like many of today’s smartphones, Simon used a touch-screen and an optional stylus.  

Of course, smartphones have come a long way since 1993, and the price, thankfully, has come down quite a bit, making them much more accessible to the average consumer. Nokia soon followed IBM’s Simon with its Nokia 900, with more and more advanced phones introduced in the 21st century.

Today, the best-selling smartphone on the market is Apple’s I-Phone. Released in 2007 after much rumor and speculation, the I-Phone weighs a mere 0.4 ounces and costs between $99 and $299. With its endless array of applications, Youtube and I-tunes capability, the I-Phone is popular for its user-friendly interface.

telephone directory

In a lot of ways, what Spokeo is trying to do for people search is similar to what Apple did with the I-Phone. The goal is to make people-searching and networking less complicated, more user-friendly, and more accessible. We’re constantly evolving to keep up with consumer’s needs for a search engine that’s fun and easy to use.

Spokeo is not the first way people have searched for friends and family. People search has been around since the White Pages started delivering to doorstops. Search engines have been around since the early 1990s, allowing for information exchange like never before. Social networking was the next step in 2002, allowing for thousands of users to share their photos, favorite books and movies, and contact information with friends. Many people are familiar with Google Maps, using it routinely to look up directions or search for satellite images.

Never before, however, has all this wealth of information available readily on the Internet been compiled into an easy-to-use interface. Instead of visiting numerous sites to gather information, you can now visit just one website.

We’re always trying to improve our user interface to make it simpler and easier. We welcome your comments, thoughts, and suggestions.

Evolution, not revolution, is what we’re all about!

At this year’s CES, Yahoo announced their plans for Yahoo! Mail to become a central hub for your social activity. This new Yahoo! Mail (called Yahoo! Life) will treat email addresses as social profiles, and friendships will be based on how often you communicate with your contacts. In many ways, this is what Spokeo has been doing so far, and we’re quite excited that our concept has been vindicated.

When we talk about social networks, we immediately think of MySpace, Facebook, and Friendster. What’s not obvious is that almost every website today (such as Youtube, Flickr, and Last.fm) has become a social network. They all have user profiles, messaging, sharing, and other member interactions built-in. In the past, you can only communicate within the community, but increasingly these social networks are opening up the data to enable interoperability among networks.

This data-portability movement pushes the ultimate social network – the Internet. As Spokeo has demonstrated, it does not matter where your friends are, or what social networks they use. When they post blogs and photos for you to see, you want to access it immediately in a secure manner. Information should not be constrained within certain networks; after all, the free data flow is what makes the Internet so great.

Previously the Internet was just a bunch of web pages, but now it’s becoming a web of interconnected people.  Hopefully one day, we can start organizing the world’s information based on not just PageRank, but also social relevancy

Recently there has been a lot of discussion and excitement around Google’s OpenSocial. Actually the idea of an open social graph has been around for a long time. Six Apart (people behind LiveJournal, Typepad, and Vox) announced their plans for opening up their social graph in September 2007. Even before that, Spokeo released the first-ever social graph reader that aggregates your accounts across different social networks in November 2006.

For non-geeks, what is open social graph? Open social graph is just a cool way of saying “open social networks”. Right now, your friends on MySpace cannot talk to those on Friendster. You cannot see your Bebo friends’ activities on Xanga. Open social graph will allow you to do all these things.

How does this benefit you, the end user? Well, with open social graph, you can now see all your friends’ activities regardless of what social network they are on. In Spokeo 1.0, we have demonstrated the concept of aggregating your different accounts into one place. In Spokeo 2.0 (which just released last week), we have taken that concept further. Now you don’t have to join a social network to reconnect with your friends. Spokeo automatically finds and tracks all your friends’ blogs, photos, music, and videos.

Before open social graph, the Internet was divided into different communities, and your information was restricted in these artificial boundaries. With open social graph, social information can flow freely in the true spirit of the Internet.

We have been working very hard to bring Spokeo 2.0 to you, and this is why we haven’t blogged as often as we used to. Today we have just released a bug-fixing patch to last week’s debut of Spokeo 2.0. Now we welcome you all to try the new feature. Please press “+”, then add friends from address book. Some cool and amazing things will happen, but I won’t spoil the surprise by telling what it is here

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

I was reading how some websites (most recently Quechup) mishandle their user privacy. As you know, many social networks induce users to invite their friends en-mass, which is known as “viral marketing.” Some unethical sites take this tactic too far and simply spam their users’ address books. While I understand the need to grow a website, I disapprove of manipulative practices.

Almost all sites have these so-called social and viral features such as sharing and address book import. That said, it is a fine line between valid viral tactics and malicious spamming, and some sites have crossed that line. We have yet to win over our users’ trust, which is why we haven’t introduced viral features. If you look closely, we don’t even have an Invite button.

As we have promised many times, we will not build a feature that does not make sense with our core value proposition. This means that we will not introduce any viral or social feature unless it complements your user experience. Yes, our minimalist design principle will hamper our user growth in the near term, but we hope that our persistence will win your trust at the end.

Building user trust takes a long time, and every bit of goodwill will help. This is why why we actively blog and communicate with our users. We cannot say that we will never make any mistakes, but we will be transparent and we will take responsibility.

Finally, we are releasing some cool features tomorrow, so the system will be down temporarily for upgrades.

Most social network content is publicly available. People are encouraged to share, otherwise, online communities would not exist. If all MySpace users had private profiles then it would be very hard to meet new friends. Does Spokeo follow the tradition of publicizing user content?

No, our users’ reading lists have been and will always be private by default. Spokeo is an aggregation tool for reading your friends’ content, not a social network for sharing content. No one will know what you are reading on Spokeo, even if they are friends with you on MySpace or Friendster.

When you request a friendship on social networks, the recipient is notified. On most social networks, when you subscribe to a person’s blog, the recipient is notified as well. Social networks are designed this way to facilitate interpersonal interaction. However, Spokeo is not here to help you make friends. We are here to help you track what you think is important. You are free to track your coworkers and your crushes since your privact is always respected.

We take privacy very seriously because we understand that online reading is just as private as reading real-life letters, books, and magazines. Feel free to contact me if you have any follow-up privacy questions.

Do you use hand towels for toilet paper? (Why am I making bad analogies like Ray did here?) You probably don’t because hand towels are better suited for drying your hands than … you know what. Even though both are made of paper, they are designed for different purposes.

Spokeo is a specialized reader designed only to track your friends; whereas, MySpace and LiveJournal are multi-purpose social networks more geared toward expressing yourself and socializing online. Just like hand towels cannot replace toilet paper (and vice versa), Spokeo can never replace social networks. You cannot message or blog or comment on Spokeo, since including these features would clutter Spokeo’s reading interface. For the same reason, social networks cannot allow you to browse more conveniently and comfortably than Spokeo, since they got 10 times more buttons that do more than just reading.

It’s nice to be able to do everything in one page, but it’s not good to have hundreds of small buttons that no one knows what it does. Your computer screen has a fixed real estate, so there is a limit to what a website can do. Since most people browse online way more often than writing blogs or posting photos, we feel that there is a need for a specialized reader that helps you organize your friends’ content in one place. With Spokeo, you can quickly take a glance of all the updates across your friend networks. Afterwards, you can decide whether you should go to MySpace or LiveJournal to hang out.

So why use Spokeo? Well, it’s a simpler and hassle-free way to connect.

You all know how Spokeo works, but some of you still ask “What exactly is Spokeo?” Let me cycle through some common terms.

Aggregator
An aggregator is a very broad class of websites. Any website that pulls information from more than one website is an aggregator. Pageflakes is an aggregator because it pulls weather information from one site and sports information from ESPN. My Yahoo and Digg are also aggregators. A trendy name for an aggregator is mashup.

DLA
DLA stands for Digital Life Aggregator. DLA’s are aggregators that specifically aggregate your information from many sites. All DLA’s other than Spokeo centralize your online profiles into one sooper dooper uber profile page. Spokeo centralizes your online friends into one one sooper dooper uber reading list.

Reader
A reader lets you read different sources of information. Until Spokeo arrived, readers only compiled blogs from generic sources. The most popular readers are Google Reader and Bloglines. Spokeo has some catching up to do!

Spokeo
So now, how do we classify Spokeo? Spokeo is an aggregator since it pulls in information from all your social networks. Spokeo is also a DLA since we pull in information that is specific to each user. Spokeo is the first reader to go beyond generic blogs.

We could call ourselves an all-in-one aggregator, DLA, and reader, but for the life of me, I cannot think of anything more obtuse. Who comes up with this stuff? Here, we call ourselves a friend tracker. So simple, and yet so clear. I know this blog post was a painful read, but hey, you brought it upon yourself. Watch what you ask for!

Most of us probably know how to use MySpace, Friendster, Facebook, and other social networks very well. However, does it mean that those interfaces are intuitive and optimal? When you first signed on those sites, have you ever had the experience of not knowing what to do?

We believe that you have, so there should be a simpler and faster way to connect with friends. We want something that does not require complicated logins, something that works with existing social networks, something that is not just about popularity contests and friend requests, and something that does not constantly notify us with emails. With these goals in mind, we set out to build the new Spokeo.

Since social interactions are about friends, we design the Spokeo interface to revolve around your buddy list. Click on a buddy, and you can see his or her blogs, photos, videos, and music all in one news stream. Friends with new updates are in bold, with numbers showing the "number of new posts that you haven’t seen". This way, you can quickly take a glance of all the changes in your friends’ network.

If you got too many friends (hundreds?), Spokeo’s interface will truly shine. Click on the "updated" mode to show only friends with new updates, allowing you to quickly go through the list of changes. In addition, keyboard shortcuts come in handy when you got tons of news. Simply press "c" to cycle through only the new articles that you haven’t seen.

Spokeo is a reading/browsing utility. You can’t message or interact with others. There is no concept of sharing for the goods of the community, so your data is kept private and protected. Spokeo treats you like a reader, rather than expecting you to share something. Therefore, there is no pressure to maintain a good-looking profile, or to add as many friends as possible to appear cool.

Because Spokeo is so specialized in just tracking friends, it is very simple and elegant to use. Since most people just read their friends’ updates when connecting with them (as opposed to playing games, sending gifts, leaving messages, …), there is a value in building a specialized browser that does just that.

Some people asked me if the new Spokeo got fewer features than before. Well, I think “less cluttered” is a better description.

Spokeo is an aggregation tool, not a social network. Adding social features to an aggregator is like adding video games (a feature unrelated to music) to IPod. While it might be cool to be able to play video games or even use radio on IPod, ultimately IPod is still about music. If IPod compromises the music-playing capability for video-game support, I am sure the sales will drop.

Why is there a compromise? Why not integrate everything into one package? Well, because you can’t. Every feature or button takes away the effectiveness of other buttons. The screen size is fixed. As you add more buttons into it, each button becomes less prominent. Google demonstrates this concept quite well.

Aggregators like Spokeo have to be dead simple; otherwise, people will visit the original sites themselves. The value in aggregation lies not in sharing or social networking; rather, it is about convenience. Nowadays, every website seems to be compelled to include social network features (so-called viral marketing) so that it can be part of the Web 2.0. We, too, blindly added various Digg-like, Delicious-like, MySpace-like features that unnecessarily cluttered our interface. It took us a while to realize that we have deviated from our core value proposition of simplicity. After all, it’s hard to disregard what everyone else is saying.

We sat down and told ourselves to start anew. We debated for weeks about every single button’s placement, and we automate as much functionalities as we can. Many features though, like sharing, didn’t stay because it’s simply unrelated to tracking friends. Sure, Bloglines, Google Reader, and others all got some way to share posts with friends. However, how many of their users actually use it? If you really want to share a post, is it really that hard to email the link to your friend? If you want to promote a story, isn’t submitting it to Digg simpler and better?

Aggregators need to be … aggregators, not another Internet portal or social network or social news site. With this in mind, we present you the new Spokeo – the simplest aggregator with the least amount of buttons. If you want to share stuff or write blogs or be social, sorry, we don’t support these features. However, if you want to track your friends, I guarantee that we got all the features you need, and more.