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]