The idea behind Timeline is simple: Facebook basically arranges all of your posts, comments, uploads, and likes chronologically from the day you joined. This allows your friends to easily navigate an approximation of your ‘life story,’ from your birth to your graduation from college to your momentous decision to Like Jolly Ranchers on July 10th, 2009. Whatever you think of the mandatory change, Timeline aims to provide users with a better way to preserve memories and share more of their story beyond the most recent update and wall post.

The idea is ingenious in its own way, but I don’t think you can call it ‘new’; after all, we were sorta there first! If you’ve spent any time on Spokeo browsing celebrities through our awesome, new Famous People search feature (introduced last month), you may have noticed our timeline feature that arranges key events in the life of the celeb chronologically in a fun, informative format. These celeb timelines, like the rest of a Spokeo Famous Person profile, are assembled entirely by our complex algorithms. These algorithms scour a huge mass of celeb-related data and ‘determine’ key events in their lives: marriages, award nominations, the release of an album, a stay in the State pen – important milestones in the life of an individual.

Let’s say you want to know a little more about that Justin Bieber fellow you’ve been hearing so much about: Where the heck did he come from? Why is he on every television screen and magazine cover in America? Why is his hair like that? All valid questions. Simply enter the mop-topped little scamp’s name into Spokeo and look for the handy timeline (located under “News) and you’ll be a Bieber savant in a matter of seconds. It’s a quick and easy way to get the scoop on the story of your favorite celeb, without having to read a long block of text on Wikipedia. Not only that, but you’ll have access to the largest free database of celeb photos on the web, along with videos, news and more. Try it today!

“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 are enjoying the holidays, as well as taking a look back at a wonderful year. 2011 was certainly the most eventful year in Spokeo history, with redesigns, tweaks, improvements and fun new features galore. Let us count the ways!

Well, first of all, it was a huge year for us in terms of traffic and press. Thanks to a wave of social media buzz, the first few weeks of 2011 saw an exponential spike in traffic; our renowned customer service team kicked their impressive operation into high-gear, responding to each and every email and answering every phone call as quickly and thoroughly as possible. Due to the influx of first-time visitors, we thought it was a good idea to review Spokeo’s opt-out and removal process for our readers. This renewed burst of attention culminated in a Time Magazine cover story (!) about people search and data aggregation. Not bad for a site created by a couple of college buddies in mom’s basement!

On the product side, we added a slew of fancy new features and made a fair share of improvements to the site’s design and layout, as well. Our phone search page was the first to get the makeover treatment, followed by our name and reverse email search features. For mobile and tablet users, we also made great strides with our mobile site. For users searching people by first and last name, we added a very helpful location auto-suggest feature, which allows you to narrow your name search down by location and find the person you’re looking for even faster.

And it doesn’t stop here. We made dealing with annoying telemarketers easier by adding this cool feature. We also started our very own Affiliate program. (Have a website and want to advertise Spokeo?  It’s free to join! Click here to read more.) And, as if that wasn’t enough, we added the largest (and certainly most fun) feature of all – Spokeo Famous People Search. Simply go to the search bar and enter the first and last name of a celebrity, living or dead, and you’ll have access to the most comprehensive database of celeb profiles, photos and videos on the net.

While 2011 was a great year for Spokeo (did I mention that our team doubled?), we plan on making 2012 even better for our users. You ain’t seen nothing yet!

Introducing Spokeo Famous People Search!

This is big news, folks. With over a million profiles on anyone you can imagine, living or dead, Spokeo Famous People Search takes the guilt out of America’s guiltiest pleasure. If they’re famous, they’re here: Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber, Bill Gates, Mickey Mantle… the list goes on. Each celebrity profile has the latest news, videos and photos available – think Wikipedia with a little bit of TMZ thrown in for good measure. To accomplish the huge task of putting together all these profiles, our world-class engineers have harnessed the cutting-edge power of semantic technology to identify and categorize millions of celeb bios, photos, videos, news and just about everything else. Kill some time (or lots of it) by browsing Spokeo’s photo viewer, which boasts access to the largest collection of celebrity photos on the web. We are proud and excited to be bringing people search into the future. Searching celebs has never been this fun.

Some cool features:
- Millions of photos – the largest collection of celeb photos freely available on the web.
- Simplified timeline showing important events in the life of each famous person.
- Relationship information ranging from family and friends to love interests and flings.
- Realtime Twitter map of celebrity spottings and whereabouts.

Head to our homepage and start searching!

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.

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.

Mark Suster, a guest-blogger over at TechCrunch, has written a fun, breezy history of social networking. Suster was there in the beginning, from the misty pre-history of CompuServe and Prodigy through the AOL epoch, when a plague of those CDs with "1000 Hours of FREE AOL" began popping up all over the place (my brother and I would throw them like Frisbees in the backyard), up through the recent explosion of Web 2.0 megasites like YouTube and Facebook. His survey is a quick, entertaining overview of where social networks have been, where they are, and where they’re headed (don’t miss the attached Powerpoint slides).

Given their current dominance, it’s tempting to view the evolution of the social networking as a inexorable process that culminates in Facebook: "All roads lead to Zuckerberg," as it were. When it comes to explaining the phenomenal success of Facebook, however, Suster is clear: they flourished while other social networks floundered because they were open to innovation from within and without (just look at all those 3rd party apps!). Not only that, but Zuckerberg and co. understood that social networks had to be, above all social – places to share experiences, communicate with friends, family, colleagues and like-minded strangers. Facebook gave the user a large, growing set of tools to share and communicate, from posting blogs, sharing links and uploading photos and videos; they also allowed the user to experience all of this in real time, and all at once, via their "News Feed."

Similar lessons can be learned from tracing the history of "people search," from the hoary old days of the White Pages, where a forest of phone numbers and addresses lay buried in a 30-lb brick of cheap paper, through the launch of Spokeo 5, where users can browse through an immense, ever-expanding web of constantly updated information at record speed. Spokeo has tried to improve on the outdated design of older, competitors like Intelius and Zabasearch to make the people searching process quicker, more interactive and, yes, more social. Thanks to features like our Friends List (our very own "News Feed") and Reverse Email search, our users can keep up to date with their friends myriad social network profiles and discover new friends in the process. As social networks like Facebook continue to grow and expand and respond to user needs, we will be growing along with them.