Tech Watch

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 [...]

"Jaron Zepel Lanier (born May 3, 1960) pronounced /ˈdʒɛrɨn lɨˈnir/ is an American computer scientist, composer, visual artist, and author. He made an experimental film in the past, but does not consider himself a filmmaker. In the early 1980s he popularized the term "Virtual Reality" (VR) for a field in which he was a pioneer. [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]