Merging of Social Networks or Big Brother Made Easy?
December 15th, 2007
Tired of too many social networks? Looking for one stop shopping, instead of 10 sites you need to log into each day to see what your friends are doing? Is 1/2 your day spent keeping up with your friends and collegues on blogs, Facebook and Twitter? Well look no longer!
There is a new site that will pull all your friend’s content to one place called Spokeo. It is being described as a social network and blog aggregator. On the homepage, it says find your friends or track your friends (this sounds disturding in a way), but that is exactly what it does. After signing up for the site and adding all my contacts, I am not sure if it is cool or just plain creepy.
How does it work? Based on the contacts within your email and social networks it goes out to the web and pulls content associated to those email addresses from sites all over the web like Pandora or Amazon. Additionally, it pulls in updates of your friends from Social Networks with RSS feeds like Bebo, Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Hi5, imeem, Last.fm, LinkedIn, MySpace, Pandora, Slide, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Windows Live Spaces, Yelp, and YouTube.
The creepy part? For a friend or collegue you can now see their blog posts, the tweets they are Twittering, new photos they posted on Flickr, updates they made to LinkedIn, their MySpace page, music mixes created on Pandora and books/products they have reviewed on amazon.com all in one place. It is weird, you almost get a full view of how people in your life interact with the web. It is like you are Big Brother and you can see right into their PC.
I will admit, it is an interesting concept, but in my opinion it still needs a little work. From a user experience, you have to add social network by social network. It should just present a single page where you enter in your username and password for all the social networks rather than doing one by one and waiting for them to pull in your contacts. The same is true for email contacts. There currently is no Outlook option either, which is where I have a ton of contacts. Also, it is not the best looking site. You can tell it was built by developers, not someone focused on user experience and interaction design.
Even though I did learn a lot of random things about my friends today, I left feeling a little dirty in a way…like I was spying. For example, I now know that my friend Toby Krout reviews quite a few books on amazon.com. Who knew? A woman who runs a web company from her home and I once emailed from my gmail account to buy a glass paperweight has a ton of photos on Flickr of her and her family. To this point, she was just an anonymous vendor, but now I have seen her and her family on vacation. I left the site wondering if someone is doing the same for me right now and whether or not they will learn that I buy Tiffany’s CDs and have reviewed them on Amazon.com (I am just kidding, I have do not like Tiffany…okay, I do. Oh, the shame of it all).
I recommend everyone give it a try and then turn off their computer and never go online again for others can see you.
