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Spokeo - Only the Beginning

I was about to write a post about Google Finance when I came across Spokeo thanks to a co-worker, sayornara productivity; hello cyber-stalking. I had first seen a story about Spokeo on TechCrunch a week ago, but had yet to find the time to explore the tool.

Spokeo is a very intuitive tool that allows you to associate email addresses with your account, the engine then takes those email addresses, scours the internet and finds and RSS feeds attributed to the address. So if your college buddy uses the same email address for everything you can enter that address and find his MySpace, LinkedIn and Flickr streams.

The Spokeo site only utilizes open systems, so the information you see is stuff that anyone can find surfing the web, but now you have it all in one place. Your friends blog posts, his LinkedIn profile and maybe the photos from the office party last night; all of them show up in one dashboard for you to view in your leisure.

I called is cyber-stalking for one reason: the person you loaded into Spokeo has no idea you are reading his or her feeds in this manner. They might never know you are aware of them at all, but you can follow their life if they are connected and blog or Digg or Stumble at all… so take it to the next step: load in someone’s email that you are not friends with. Take a competitor or employee for example, give Spokeo the email address and see what happens.

I am personally all about a seamless persona online. I have an online persona that matches who I am in the real world to a great degree, but many people treat the online version of themselves as a truly separate entity. Allowing the online version to say and do things they would never do in front of friends, family and co-workers. So what happens when a perspective employer uses a tool like Spokeo or even Google just to see who you are and what you are like?

Where are we headed from here? My ten year old thinks that there was nothing before the Internet, and maybe he was right, but when his generation is in college and then the work force, what will the work place even look like?

The interesting Website of the day: Google Finance might be one you have all seen before, but it has some nice tools that may have gotten lost in the shuffle. Comparisons, news and SEC filings all in one place. (This is because I decided against focusing the post on GFinance and went with Spokeo instead…)

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