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 Post your story in the comments section, or shoot me an email at nasrin@spokeo.com!

"The Internet" versus "the real world" has become a hot topic in the news these days. But are they really as separate as we might think?

Internet privacy has been all over the media lately, even involving giants like Google and Facebook. People are growing more interested in the availability and control of their information online.

As more and more people "go online," our digital identities are slowly blending with real world identities. The focus is more on showcasing and controlling these digital identities, whether through what music playlists we choose to share or how we summarize our interests on our social networking sites, to how clever we can make our 140-character tweets. Instead of looking for anonymity, we seek ways to present ourselves in the best light possible.

So just how widespread is social media in the Internet age? Check out some of these statistics:

•    On average 175 million users log in to Facebook every 24 hours.
•    There are 11 million LinkedIn users across Europe.
•    Towards the end of 2009, the average number of tweets per day was over 27.3 million.
•    The average number of tweets per hour was around 1.3 million.
•    More than 700,000 local business have active Pages on Facebook.  
•    15% of bloggers spend 10 or more hours each week blogging.   
•    There are 126 million of these blogs on the Internet.
•    Flickr hosts 4 billion photos as of October 2009.
•    Wikipedia currently has in excess of 14 million articles, meaning that its 85,000 contributors have written nearly a million new posts in six months.
•    YouTube serves 1 billion videos a day, with 12.2 billion videos viewed per month in the United States.
•    82 percent of Internet users watch videos online with the average user viewing 182 videos per month.
•    90 trillion emails were sent on the Internet in 2009 with an average of 247 billion emails a day.
•    81 percent of these emails were spam.
•    There are 1.4 billion email users worldwide.

* Thanks to Jake Hird at E-Consultancy and Amit Desai at Giga Thoughts.

Social media will be around as long as people are curious about others and interested in presenting themselves in a controlled way to their friends, family, and business contacts. The emphasis is not on reducing our Internet availability but understanding how the focus has changed to a more open Web experience.

How do you use social media?

A connected world: Internet usage by population percentage

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Harrison, co-founder of Spokeo, was on CNN Newsroom last night with anchor Brooke Baldwin discussing Internet privacy. Did anyone catch the broadcast? Still looking for a video!

We usually get food delivered to the office every week.

We had some delicious Chinese food today and now we’re all comatose.

Happy Friday everyone!

Photo Credit: Amanda Cardenas

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A couple of years ago, Time Magazine’s Person of the Year edition showcased a reflective cellophane sheet on the cover. The headline read: “You. Yes, You. You control the Information Age. Welcome to your world.” This was back in 2007, when social networking sites and community-sharing portals like YouTube started growing in popularity.

Since then, the Web has become increasingly people-centered, with the focus shifting to the average user, their interests, hobbies, and most importantly, connections with other people.

It seems fairly obvious what the main point of the Spokeo People Search Engine is – to use the awesome power of the World Wide Web to locate information on anyone, anywhere. Instead of wading through the information yourself, Spokeo lets you harness this remarkable “people-power,” or this huge collection of information provided by users for users to do the hard work for you.

Beyond the idea of people search there’s a whole realm of uses that Spokeo can be used for. From the amateur geologist using the site’s built-in “detective work” to access public and private records to help reconstruct families, to the parent who can easily monitor their child’s online activity, Spokeo fills a unique niche in the new people-centered web.

Here are a few more ways to use Spokeo:

-          If you find lost items, like keys, a wallet, a purse, a gym pass, a water bottle, a Harry Potter novel, search it for a name. Using some detective work to imagine that the person who dropped that awesome Harry Potter novel might live in the same state, or even the same city, where it was found, use Spokeo’s easy geo-grouping algorithm to locate their phone or email address, get in touch, and collect your good karma for the day. (Of course this is only helpful if you include some identifying information on your belongings in case they get lost, so some good Samaritan can help you get it back!)

 -          Save the environment! Printed White and Yellow pages consume enormous amounts of paper and millions of Americans receive them each year without ever using them. By stopping your Yellow Pages subscription and using Spokeo’s online search engine instead you can significantly reduce your ecological footprint.  No more paper waste! No more squinting to read tiny printed listings! Every little bit counts so make sure you can do your part.

  -          Run an email search for the contact you met on Craigslist who you will meet later tonight for a couch sale. Finding out that he listens to Madonna might be a nice talking point. But more seriously, running checks on people you will be meeting for the first time is not only a good way to break the ice but it’s a great way to check out to see if they’re legitimate sellers and not scammers.

 
What are some other uses of Spokeo that you can imagine? If you have a story to share, post a comment, or shoot me an email at nasrin@spokeo.com. The best story I read will receive a special gift in the mail. Yes, hedgehogs are involved, and yes, it will be both fun and useful!

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Hey bloggers. There’s been a lot of buzz on various blogs and news sources online about some of our available Premium features, as well as some misconceptions (and suggestions of scams) surrounding what type of searches Spokeo is capable of doing.

We are a people-centered technology. The purpose of our endeavor is to simplify the Internet by centering it on the individual user seeking to stay in touch through various social networks.

Our primary goal when we started back in 2006 was to create something new. We wanted to fulfill a need to organize people-related data in a meaningful way. In the past four years we’ve listened to feedback from our users and included additional features, including the latest version of the site that was launched a month and a half ago.

Since then, we’ve been rolling out new privacy features to better enhance the user experience.

Because we are a relatively new type of technology, there’s a lot of hype about our search capabilities. Many people wonder what kind of information we can provide and whether such information is a scam.

A good way to explain what Spokeo is, would be to explain what Spokeo is not. Contrary to myth, Spokeo does not publish information on Social Security numbers. We do not have credit information, including exact credit scores and wealth ratings. We do not know the balance of your bank account. In fact, we don’t have any specific private financial information about anyone. We don’t allow third parties to scam your credit information.

We are, however, to be used as a reference displaying an estimate of this information found elsewhere on the web. We offer the following disclaimer at the bottom of every page:

Our goal with this blog is to keep things transparent so we can keep you better informed about what’s going on behind the scenes. Stay tuned as we work on improving our features and please keep your feedback coming!

Just a quick update! Street addresses are no longer available under our public search. As you know, we always consider your feedback when updating our site so we can make your user experience more enjoyable.  Please continue providing us with your comments and suggestions as we work to grow together!

Hi bloggers, just a quick update. If you’ve experienced sluggishness recently while using our site, it’s because of increased traffic. We are in the process of acquiring all the servers we need to handle this usage. We’re scheduled to start installing them next week, and hope to have them come online in two or three weeks from now. Once our new servers are up, we expect to be able to handle all incoming traffic.

While we work on getting everything in order, you might experience a slight delay in the page to opt out, but performance should have been consistent for these past few days.

Thank you all for your patience, and stay tuned as we work to implement upcoming improvements to your user experience.

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!

We are now number 9 on Google for the query "people search"!

With our unique aggregation of all the various social networking sites your contacts frequent, Spokeo is among the most powerful people search engines available on the Internet.

If you aren’t a Premium member yet, check out some of our plan rates to further streamline and speed up your searches to include greater details and features.