DemoGirl

Spokeo is a “friend tracker” that keeps you updated about all of your friends activities across the different social networks they belong to. It may even show you sites you didn’t know your friends participated in. You can sign up using your AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo! credentials and Spokeo will immediately search the Web for sites your contacts have signed up for using the same email address. You can also add friends from MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, etc. Spokeo doesn’t alert your friends of any of this activity. It doesn’t invade their email with requests to sign up or ask them if they wish to share this information. Basically, Spokeo believes that if you sign up for one of these sites and don’t make your profile private, then it’s fair game. I totally agree. I sign up for many services every day and I know that I have the right to make certain information private. If I don’t, anyone can access it. After signing up for Spokeo, I found one of my friends Amazon wishlists, a Picassa Web Album I never knew existed, and another friends profile on Digg. The one thing I would like to see is the option to view what your Spokeo profile will look like to other users, just so you know how much information you really have floating around out there.

Spokeo is not a social networking site. You don’t create your own profile, make friends, or leave updates about the last time you took a shower. It’s basically RSS for social networking. It’s so simple to set up and gets straight to the point. Here’s my screencast tour of Spokeo:

Flash Demo3m24s

[via TechCrunch]

Mahalo, the human powered search engine, has some new social features that could really help get you better and more relevant search results.  Mahalo Social, obviously named for its social networking abilities, allows users on Mahalo to create profiles, make friends, yada, yada, yada.  Really, it’s not as boring as it sounds.  First of all, now you can easily submit links to sites that you think are relevant in search results.  The links are reviewed by Mahalo managers and if you submit a bad link, everyone will know.  They’ll know because your Mahalo Social profile contains a ranking of links recommended, links accepted, and banned links.  The more links that are accepted, the higher your ranking will be.  If you submit links that end up banned, then your ranking will go down.  All of your recommended links are in your profile as well as any of your friends links.  If you add someone as a friend and they add you as well, then your links will show up on their profile page.  You can also add links to profiles from other social networking sites you belong to like MySpace, YouTube, or Facebook.  On the result pages, there’s now an option to start a discussion about the page itself.  You’ll also be given credit on the result page, should your link be accepted.  For example, there’s a page for “how to use Mahalo Social“.  If someone were to add a link to this demo then their profile would appear on the page.

I think these are all great additions to Mahalo.  I only have one question:  Where is the Mahalo page for “screencast”?  Alright, alright, here’s my screencast tour of Mahalo Social:

Flash Demo3m7s