Intrigued by Spokeo, which I found out about through a post on Fleet Street PR titled Spokeo - Cool or Creepy? (also, listen to the embedded podcast). Right now, it's taking quite a while to read in all my Gmail contacts (over 1000).
I'm curious to see if assembling information by contact (even if all the data that Spokeo is assembling is public, that you could find if you just knew where to look or had the time to assemble it yourself) makes a noticeable difference in how useful the information is.
In a way, I would suspect how information is organized is more important, than the information itself.
One example is from Art Composition - it's often been observed that simply arranging figures in a painting using pyramidal themes imparts feelings of monumentally beyond what's being depicted.
The Raft of the Medusa, 1819.
In Théodore Géricault's Raft of the Medusa, taken from the Wikipedia entry on Théodore Géricault, the composition dominates and actually creates meaning beyond the horror of what's deplicted (In fact, I spent some time looking at The Raft of the Medusa while I was in Paris this week, see At The Louvre today - enjoying Art, - going over twice to the Louvre to look mainly at the Géricault and Delacroix large paintings - as well as hang out under the big glass pyramid at the entrance of the Louvre). In this case, I should point out, the double pyramidal structure was used (two interlaced triangles).
Compare that to Paul Cezanne, my favorite painter, treatment of Bathers, done near turn of the century that a fairly ordinary scene where composition, in color and brushstroke, is, itself, the main reason for the painting.
Les Grandes Baigneuses, 1906: the triumph of Poussinesque stability and geometric balance.
Cezanne knew that structure, and in fact, the space around objects (often called "negative space" in art school) is as important, if not more important, than the space of the objects deplicted.
I don't want to discount the role of color here - but my main point is not really about art, it's about Social Networks - that the topology, design, taxonomy of how information is collected is actually more important than the information, itself.
Getting back to Spokeo.com, or Spokeo, potentially, organizing the data of my contacts, by each name, gives me a way to get at information I might not have ordinarily seen, which could give me ideas on how to relate to them or what they like.
Going back to another example, chemistry and physics, the idea of what an atom is, what electrons are - it's pretty much a basic unit of something, at least, as far as we can conceive of it. When you organize the atoms and electrons in certain patterns you get one element or another - you get molecules - yet the data, itself, is, if we have the correct notion of this, essentially just electrons, protons and neutrons assembled in a certain pattern or sequence - and one change, can make glass in plastic or lead into gold.
Looking at Spokeo, I don't yet see all my contacts and all the places they could go, but in some cases, looking at certain one's, I've found out additional information I'd not have known. Spokeo organizes each contact it finds by social network and shows me a profile of that contact, if one exists in any of the social networks it monitors.
I'll continue to play with Spokeo when I have the time to see if there's more insights that I can gleam from it. For one thing, in certain profiles, I can find out what books on a wish list were ordered or being considered to be ordered from Amazon for that individual, which could be useful in terms of having a dialog with them.
But then again, there seems to be a lot of information, and some names I'd expect to be present, missing and the program is sluggish and might be better if it was a desktop client pulling the data than running it remotely on a website.
