Spokeo Blog | Find People through People Search

We haven’t announced a lot of new features lately, but that does not mean we’ve stopped innovating. We upgrade our system regularly to improve our performance , which explains why the service is down every two weeks. Most of the works are happening underneath to keep the service speedy as we grow our user base.

We’ve recently introduced username search as a new search heuristic to help you find more people. Now you just need to type in someone’s username, then we will search across all the social networks for their content. More social networks support username search than email search, so this functionality will help broaden your reach significantly. We are still working on tying all the search heuristics together, so stay tune for a more powerful Spokeo to come.

We are currently undergoing some server maintenance as of 10pm PDT, June 17.  We apologize for the inconvenience.  We expect to be back online in a few hours.

Spokeo will be undergoing server maintenance between Saturday, June 7 00:00 - 12:00 UTC.  In the US, that means Friday evening, June 6 starting at 5pm PDT.

During this time, the Spokeo website will be down and unusable, as we will be performing some necessary database maintenance.  No data will be lost during this maintenance window.

We apologize for this inconvenience and will be working hard to get the site up as soon as possible.

We got onto Wall Street Journal and Daily Herald earlier this week. Our traffic has surged and all our machines are under a lot of strain. For the past two days, we have processed more than a million searches, and we have turned away tens of thousands of users from trying out Spokeo. We are trying very hard to keep our servers alive, so please stay with us and continue your support.

We got some feedback from a few users about not being able to access their premium accounts immediately after the payment.   After an hour of investigation, we’ve found that Paypal was undergoing some system maintenance from around 12am ~ 3am PDT last night, so they were late in reporting back the payment status to our system.  We apologize for any possible inconvenience to all affected users, but everything should be fine now.

Spokeo will be under going a big migration to new servers today from 13:00 PDT to 15:00 PDT.  We finally have all our servers set up and we’ll be working hard to get them online for you.  We’re sorry for the inconvenience in the meantime, but we hope the Spokeo experience will be much better afterward.

We’ve accumulated over 6M people’s data over the past few months, and this poses a huge engineering problem.  Our site has become slower and slower due to the data overload, and there’s not much more that we can do with our existing infrastructure. 

We’ve designed and built a new infrastructure that triples our capacities, and we will start the transition next week.  There might be some unexpected performance hiccups as we move to the new computers; however, Spokeo will be much faster afterwards.  Please bear with us in the meantime

Somtimes it’s hard to wear the same clothes day after day - you just get tired of them. So awhile back we hired a new designer to make us some fancy new pants. We’re proud to say that our new threads are complete. Kudos to you, Raphael.

Our goal here at Spokeo is to create the most effective tool for helping people connect with their friends. With social networks and photo/video content sites becoming more and more popular every day, it’s becoming way too difficult to keep up with everything your friends are posting online.

The average Spokeo user who adds friends from their webmail address book finds 87 friends on 13 different social networks. If you wanted to keep up with that many people, you would have to visit anywhere between 13 and 87 websites per day. That’s a lot of work. And considering that most of your friends don’t post new content every day anyway, much of it may be wasted effort.

Spokeo is attempting to solve this problem by finding all your friends’ stuff, everywhere. We then present their content to you in a simple easy-to-digest interface which highlights the new stuff and doesn’t burden you with an overload of redundant features which you already have from your existing social networks.

We recently implemented a new invite feature which helps you connect with your friends. By signing up with Spokeo (which, as you know, is as simple as entering your already existing email credentials), your friends get the benefit of staying up to date with their friends. You in turn get the benefit of us knowing more about your friends, which helps us tell you more about them.

In a short time, we can automatically and dynamically build up enough information about you and your friends to make sure you’re always in touch with their online activities - with no added effort on your part. This concept is often known as the social graph, and has been described and discussed in boring academic detail all over the place, including our blog.

Spokeo may not have invented the concept, but we’re definitely pioneers in the field. We’ve been trying to solve this network fragmentation problem since long before the social graph became a hot topic. So what makes Spokeo different from the other Web 2.0 social-graph-related applications?

Well, most of those sites are themselves social networks, which means that instead of simplifying your existing social connections, you now belong to yet another social network. And let’s be honest - unless it’s your job to join and write about social networks, you really don’t want to belong to a zillion and two different networks.

If we were a social social network aggregator instead of simply a social network aggregator, then one day you would surely need a social network aggregator aggregator. Or is it a social social network aggregator aggregator? I’m confused already. The point is that Spokeo is trying to simplify things - not add more complexity.

Anyway, we will continue to pursue our ultimate goal: making your online social life simpler and easier to manage. We hope you enjoy our new features. As always, please send us your comments and feedback - we love hearing from our users (yes, even the CAPSLOCK-LOVING-TROLLS).

A lot of your friends don’t blog or upload photos regularly, but they actively maintain their profiles.  From now on, you can track these profile changes on Spokeo.  Whenever your friends update their info or share slideshow, you will know it right away.

This is a feature requested by our users a month ago, and now it’s done!  Although we only got six people here, we do read everyone’s feedback.  Sometimes we cannot fulfill user requests as fast as we’d like to, but we will always try our best.