I was recently asked to check out
Spokeo and review it for my blog. In the interest of full-disclosure, I am getting paid to do this.
Spokeo seeks to be a central website one can go to to keep track of all ones contacts across multiple social-networking and content sites (MySpace, Flickr, YouTube, Blogger). One of the dudes there described it to me as "Trillian for social networks." It's a good idea, and one I would probably care more about if I didn't think that MySpace was the unattractive and uninteresting spawn the of the devil and that Friendster was its boring cousin. Even so, I figure the idea has potential, especially if it could be combined to include blogs and journals in a more meaningful way than it does at present, and especially if you're into that sort of thing in the first place.
On the plus side, signing up is easy and not time-consuming. It doesn't ask you a million personal questions, you can fill that stuff in later if you want. Importing your social networking acocunts into the system is easy when you first sign up, but later, no matter how hard I looked, I couldn't find a way to go back and add more.
That said, the site itself -- not attractive. More attractive than MySpace, but it still looks like it was designed for a fourteen-year-old whose only mode of communication is video games (and a 14-year-old stuck in 1990 -- Spokeo's logo has a pretty intense Sonic the Hedgehog vibe, but I always liked that game). I should also note that the thing wants to run full screen -- options are unreachable if you just run it in a smaller window -- there's no relative resizing or ability to scroll to off-screen options in certain areas of the page structure, and that's annoying, although likely fixable. There's a significant beta feeling to the state of the site at present, so if you need everything to work and make sense, I'd wait a few months to use it.
Finding people to network in within the Spokeo environment really requires you do a search on topics of interest as you're not bombarded with choices or highlighted users when logging in. A quick search on New York reveals, of course, that here too I can read "Overheard NYC". Scrolling through a list of random content from random users talking about NYC doesn't particularly appeal, but that's probably more the fault of the lowest common denominator factor of the web than Spokeo.
Ultimately, I can see the site developing into a useful tool for people who are hot into social networking. For those of us who can't stand it, or prefer to do it is a more content and contact-intensive way (i.e., LJ) its appeal and usefulness will probably remain ellusive.