123people, a service that collects information available on the Web about people from sources like Flickr, Google, and Facebook, announced that it has started operating in the United States. Previous to the announcement, 123people was only available in Europe as it was working the kinks out in its beta.
"After months of private beta, tweaking, and adding new features to improve the high-powered people search, 123people launches to the U.S. public," a company representative wrote in a blog post. "Now anyone can search for everyone they want to know."
123people, which competes with other people-finding services like Wink and Spock, features a relatively simple start page--a single search box that asks you to input a person's first and last name--but a results page that offers a slew of information that it gathers from sources across the Web.
The service gathers phone numbers, e-mail addresses, Google search results, pictures from Google images and Flickr, Facebook profiles, videos, news results, and even blogs to give the person searching a glimpse into all the information that can be collected about a particular person on the Internet. Along with the ability to find phone numbers, 123people includes a link next to each number allowing visitors to call the person using the online telephony service JaJah.
123people hopes to become a valuable resource for people trying to find individuals, but it suffers from a major drawback: finding people isn't so easy. The site will work extremely well for uncommon names, but searching for "John Smith" will yield too many results to make it useful unless the user knows who they're looking for. And chances are, if they already know the person, they probably won't find any reason to use the site.
Regardless, 123people has enjoyed some success in Europe and now that it's in the U.S., it hopes for similar results. The site is now open to all visitors and doesn't require registration.
Facebook has several layers of functionality that make it worth using, but my favorite is the once-controversial news feed. Why? I simply don't have time to check each of my friend's profiles for what's new, and the feed does a pretty great job at that without all the legwork or annoying e-mail notifications. FriendFeed is a new service that takes the idea of a news feed and extends it beyond the social network into other social services you're a part of. There are more than 20 to pick and choose from, including social news services like Digg, Delicious, and Reddit, along with microblogs like Twitter, Jaiku and Pownce.
Keep track of all the feeds for all your friends with FriendFeed.
(Credit: CNET Networks)By adding all these services to your FriendFeed, you're essentially creating another social networking profile--but this is a little different. It's almost like a digital identity, or your very own "about" page of services you use. Others can then easily subscribe to your FriendFeed and get the benefit of all of your online activity in one place. Likewise you can subscribe to theirs with one click, and track all the online activity they've made publicly available.
So what's the big deal about this service? It's really not a new idea--other services like Readr, Spokeo, Jaiku (which is incidentally one of the included feeds) let you do this with all sorts of social feeds, and 8hands, which we looked at back in late April, does it on your desktop with IM to boot. There's also the recently launched Plaxo Pulse (review), which adds some contact management into the mix as well. So to answer my original question, the most exciting part is the group of folks behind it, which consists of four ex-Google employees who have worked on big projects like Google Maps, Groups, and Gmail. That and it's super simple to use--you just need to copy and paste a few URLs, and plug in your username.
For widget junkies, there are two ways to extend your FriendFeed master feed to other platforms, including a Facebook app (which beats installing apps for each social service), along with a Javascript version you can embed on any old blog or Web site.
The service is in private beta with plans to open up to everyone in the "next month or so."
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