marcus welz

Spokeo is kind of Scaryo

Evidently 2008 is the year of the aggregators. They're everywhere. Socialthing, ping.fm, and what have you. But here's one with an immedialy obvious business model. Introducing Spokeo. An aggregator that asks you to provide your AOL, Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo email credentials (which, in my opinion isn't the safest way to share contacts and I wouldn't divulge that kind of information) to load all your contacts from your address book and then tries to connect all the dots.

Spokeo advertises that individuals who give up their email account credentials can find out "secrets" about their friends. The same information that's available free to individuals (well, subsidized by allowing Spokeo to harvest your contact list) is also sold to anyone who'll pay for it. Specifically, they're targeting HR departments.

Their business model is providing in a way, a social media-based public information "background check" to companies. And that's probably a very appealing thing to Old Economy Mega Bank Corp. which will use this service to see what potential job candidates have been up to on 43 Things, Amazon, Bebo, Blogger, Buzznet, dailymotion, deviantART, Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Flixter, Fotolog, Friendster, Hi5, iLike, imeem, Last.fm, LinkedIn, LiveJournal, Multiply, MySpace, Netlog, Pandora, PhotoBucket, Picasa, PictureTrail, Slide, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Upcoming, Veoh, Vox, Web Results, WebShots, Windows Live Spaces, Wretch, Xanga, Yelp, and YouTube.

So, if work hard and play hard, make sure what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.