Spokeo: Interesting, but mostly creepy.
I read an article about Spokeo in Newsweek the other day. It’s a social networking tool that scours other social networking sites, including Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, and Flickr and then creates feeds to keep tabs on all of your friends on the social networking sites.
For instance, I added Matt and it showed me when he updated his Friendster profile, MySpace profile, Facebook profile, and what is on his “Amazon Wish list.”
Unlike most social networking sites where you have to request to be someone’s friend, you can add anyone without requesting anything.
I find it a little creepy. Facebook and its ilk are created to communicate with friends, classmates, and colleagues. There is no messaging function on Spokeo…it seems like it’s mostly to just watch. It almost makes me want to make all of my profiles private.
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Everything Spokeo finds is publicly available, so would you want to send your friends more emails just to let them know that you are reading their public content?
It probably will feel more conventional and less creepy; however, it definitely means more email spams. I think most people would prefer not to get more friendship request emails, and there’s a good article about this debate here: http://blog.spokeo.com/?p=171
It doesn’t have to be emails. In fact, I have that notification function turned off on Facebook and Myspace, but I do get the information when I log into the sites. If you add that capability, people can opt out of receiving the emails, which, in my opinion, makes it not spam.
That said, I’ll still be checking in with Spokeo to see what new features it adds. Right now, it doesn’t offer me anything more than logging into MySpace and Facebook, which I’ll continue to do anyway because I usually use those sites to communicate with friends, not just read their info. However, in spite of it feeling a bit creepy, I’m curious to see what Spokeo will evolve into since it’s a new website with some interesting ideas.