If you've ever searched for yourself on the internet (or more usefully, others), there are a couple of tools - profile aggregators - to help:
- spock - still in closed beta
- wink - very useful and appears to have the broadest range of searches
- zoominfo - provides you with the ability to create your profile under your control
Each service aggregates data from a variety of different sources:
LinkedIn,
myspace,
bebo and other blogging sites. Using these services +
Google, you can build a reasonable profile of friends, colleagues or enemies if they have left a digital footprint.
Note that each service has a different business model. Thankfully, none are charging for contact information, unlike nasties like
Jigsaw.
1 comment:
Thanks Arthur.
Social Networks are popping up everywhere. I tried out Spock because a knowledgeable friend invited me to it, so I accepted and gave it a quick try. I was surprised how easy and automated it was. It found other information about me and easily downloaded information about me from my LinkedIn account, which is still my favorite site -- and probably will stay that way too.
I then noticed some of my more, shall we say significant friends -- including you -- also had a Spock account. So I experimented again :-) I send them together with some others an invite. Again, the ones I really cared about -- including yourself -- accepted almost immediately! :-) Which means Spock is probably doing something right and is not overly crowded yet. What additional services they provide though... ehhh... I guess remains to be seen.
As for Wink, I know of it, but never tried it. Zoominfo, heard good things, so tried it, had problems, their tech support put me off.. So I may or may not wait longer on them.
I was telling a friend only this morning that the fragmentation of information on the net is getting so refined that good aggregators will become a blessing soon (NB indeed.com and simplyhired.com). But now that there are more and more aggregators , hopefully they'll all overlap! otherwise we'll end up needing meta, then meta-meta... to (meta)^N-aggragators of aggragators! ;-) Even then, thankfully N will only grow logarithmically :-)
Thanks for another nice blog Arthur, E
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