Information Gathering I : Spokeo


Hi all,  i was researching new information gathering sources when i stumble with a website called Spokeo, in their website they claim that it "searches deep within 41 major social networks to find truly mouth-watering news about friends and coworkers", well it seems it's oriented to the gossip world, what everybody loves ;)

After seeing this promising prospect i decide to take a look and try this application, the main option is that you log in with your email account, and Spokeo will retrieve all your contacts and start gathering info about them, that's is not gonna happen in the this test; i prefer to search for a contact using an email address or a blog url.

So i launched a search with myself hoping for a good set of results.... but it was a great disappointing, Spokeo returned a very poor result set, well i though that maybe with other users i will have more results... but no, nothing at all, less info than before.

Maybe  if you allow the use of the API login, with your credentials will shield more results, but i didn't try this option yet.

A curious fact is that Spokeo has created a marketing campaign addressed at Human Resources people with "Spokeo HR", allowing the recruiters to perform an online profile of the candidate.

So it turned to be a good promise with disappointing results.

Do you have any feedback from this application?

Which other application do you recommend?

-CMM

3 comentarios:

CG said...

Christian, cool find, definitely worth looking into.

Jill Tovey said...

Hi, You should also try yasni.co.uk which does the same thing, for free and returns great results.

Christian Martorella said...

Thanks toves, i published a post about it today. And it's way better than spokeo ;)