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I’m a compulsive Google user.
If I daydream about a boyfriend from high school, I’ll Google him. The music teacher I had when I was 15? Googled. My 5th grade teacher? Googled. People I used to work with? Been there, Googled them! The problem with Google is there are SO many freaking fracking results for common names. 
When a friend told me about PeekYou last week, and showed me her PeekYou page, I was intrigued. Instead of just links to all of the places where your name was mentioned, PeekYou provides a profile page that aggregates all of the results for that person into on spot.
My page, for example (not linked here to give me a shred of privacy!) has my age, sex, the picture from my profile on MySpace, the user names I prefer, the 2 schools I attended, and my former workplace. It has links for 3 of my blogs, as well as a bio from this blog, tags for my blogs, the blog feeds, and links to the profiles I have on various social networking sites. It’s actually a little scary, because all of the information is spot on.
The nice thing about PeekYou is that if the information is incorrect, or not something I wish to make public (although, if it’s on PeekYou, it IS something you made public at one point or another!), I can edit it. I can remove information, update information, change my picture, or even ask that I not be listed at all.
It’s sort of the next version of the internet white pages. I’ve searched for a few people on it, and I’m guessing they’re living on a rock and don’t have an internet presence at all, because they’re not listed on PeekYou or Google for that matter. I’ve found lots of other people though, and all of the information seems to be correct.
PeekYou.com (http://www.peekyou.com/), an innovative search engine dedicated to finding people online, announced today that it has officially launched in beta mode. The Web site is the Internet’s first true openly edited white pages, allowing users to easily locate other Internet users with a presence on the web and access a list of all relevant links to the person being searched. The site has been in stealth mode since October 2006 and has already built profiles for over 50 million users, with more being added every day.
“People searching is one of the most popular online exercises, but until now it has been a largely inefficient and often confusing experience,” said Michael Hussey, founder of PeekYou. “PeekYou is a true Web 2.0 ‘people search’ - we discover and map where people exist online, almost like writing a biography about your life on the net. In doing so, we are building the ideal engine for individuals to monitor their own online identity.”
I definitely prefer this model of showing all results on one profile page to looking for people on Google. It’ll be interesting to see what people think of PeekYou now that it’s gone so public. Will people react badly? If they do, again, all of the information is something YOU put out there at one time…PeekYou has just compiled it in one spot.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 14th, 2007 at 3:31 pm and is filed under Geek Squad. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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