Social network search engine

If you have an address book on one of the webmail services (ie Gmail, hotmail, AOL or Yahoo), www.upscoop.com will search it and see who among your contacts is using any of the following: Aim, Bebo, Classmates, Ecademy, Facebook, Flickr, Flixster, Friendster, Hi5, LinkedIn, LiveJournal, Multiply, MySpace, Ringo, Tickle, Tribe, Yahoo! 360°, and Yelp.

I’ll leave it for other who know more about this kind of thing than I do to tell me about the technical hazards and security risks. I did a bit of due diligence on them and decided to trust them. However, their search engine choked on the 6000 contacts in my gmail account; but that seems to include anyone who has emailed me there or at the shortly-to-be-defunct explorers@whyte.com address since roughly 2001. When I tried it on my outlook address book (which I did by importing it to my unused Yahoo account) I got the following rate of hits:

321 LinkedIn users – not very surprising; first of all, I already have 299 LinkedIn contacts, and the remainder are people who I suspect signed up for it once and never used it again. For me, LinkedIn is more of a tool for maintaining professional contacts, and also getting back in touch with people I was at college with.

117 Facebook users – this is obviously the coming thing. Interestingly, UpScoop’s search mechanism is not awfully comprehensive, or else people are using different addresses, as I have 153 Facebook contacts. About half of those are people I know from here on Livejournal; there are a fair few ex-colleagues on there as well, and a number of younger relatives.

114 Ringo users – I have an account on Ringo from when a friend joined to send out photos, but I don’t find it at all attractive.

109 Flickr users – again, I have a Flickr account but have been tending to use LiveJournal’s image archive instead. If I were a more frequent photographer I might pick this one up.

101 MySpace users – This I found intriguing because I had not spotted an easy way of finding out who I know on MySpace. I’ve put in friend requests to a fair number of people as a result but am not convinced it will cause me to use MySpace any more than I do (which is tpo log in once a week or so).

100 Bebo users. I’ve only started taking this one seriously recently; really it seems to me that Facebook does all the same stuff and more, and does it better; and Flickr does much the same, and is more accessible.

74 Hi5 users. This one is completely new to me, and I’m a bit surprised given that there are so many people I know on it. So anyway I’ve signed up for it, and if you are on it too you will have heard from me already. I am struck by the relatively high proportion of professional/political contacts using it. However in the end, like Bebo and Ringo, it suffers from not being as attractive to use as Facebook.

69 Tickle users. I signed up with them briefly about three years ago, but wasn’t happy about the way they ended up charging my credit card for, basically, nothing and left. At a quick glance looks like they just generate surveys and quizzes, meme-fodder as it were. Yet there seems to be a strong representation of my professional contacts there.

57 Classmates users. This seems to be the North American version of the British Friends Reunited site; explicitly doesn’t cover the UK and Ireland.

45 Livejournal users – this seems awfully few, given that there are hundreds on my friends list; but I suspect it reflects the relative difficulty of scraping livejournal users’ addresses from their web pages. Which is a Good Thing.

43 Friendster users. Never got into it myself, but I see a lot of lj users are on it – any use these days? Or a has-been site?

19 AIM users – surprisingly low. AIM’s own import wizard scores much better.

11 Flixster users. I have never heard of it; seems to be for sharing movie ratings. Only one livejournal reader is on it.

9 Multiply users. Never heard of this one.

3 Yahoo 360° users: obviously this never took off.

2 Ecademy users. A couple of Ecademy users have tried to persuade me of its merits, but I haven’t seen them yet.

2 Tribe users; this doesn’t seem to have taken off.

1 Yelp! user. This is a site about reviewing shops and services in the US; slightly surprised that so few of my contacts are using it if so.

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