SocialWhois: Whois Lookups for the Social Web
When you want to know about a domain name, you jump to whois to get all of the information on the person who registered it. But when you want to know more about the person who just started following you on Twitter or FriendFeed, it hasn't been that easy - even though we've tried to provide you with tools to do it. Now, a new service promises to simplify the process. It's a new take on whois for the social web: SocialWhois, a service that uses XFN, microformats, APML, and tagging to provide a more complete picture of that new follower's presence online.
The service works like any number of XFN crawlers we've seen, but it's simple enough that anyone can use it. Simply enter the Twitter or FriendFeed username of the person you'd like to look up. The service will do its best to guess who the person is. As we tested it, we found it doing an incredibly good job of guessing - finding all sorts of interesting and relevant links about the users we tried.
If you'd like to tweak the results for your profile - or hide your profile completely - you can always log in using your Twitter credentials or your FriendFeed key.
Oh great. Yet another profile to complete? Not exactly. Thanks to SocialWhois' "voodoo" button. One click and you're likely to have your profile pre-populated with relevant information from your profiles across the Web.
This Isn't a Popularity Contest
One of the things that makes SocialWhois so appealing isn't what it is, but rather what it isn't. It isn't a popularity contest. It's a search for relevance:
"SocialWhois is about everything but popularity. You'll think that it's hypocrisy or irony, but I (SocialWhois' creator) am not popular on SocialWhois! And guess what, I like it that way! Really :) In fact, on SocialWhois, no one is popular.... You can navigate in the graph and discover new faces, and the way this graph is being traversed is different for everyone of us."
With the tagging functionality, you're more likely to find that user who shares similar interests with you. And in so doing, you're likely to have more engaging conversations.
It Just Works
One of the things we've always loved about whois is the fact that it just works. There are any number of services that allow you to look at the data held by the registrars, all of which have varying levels of usability and clutter. But by and large, we run whois lookups because they serve a specific purpose.
SocialWhois has a lot of that same appeal. Simple, straightforward, and it provides the information you're seeking. It will be interesting to add this to the collection of tools we use to find - and better understand - those around us on the social web.
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Google Social Graph API under the hood, by any chance? This is a relatively simple thing to do (we have something almost identical with almost identical results running as a tech test) but still, useful to have out in the wild. It's good that someone's done it.
From what I can see it only supports Twitter and Friendfeed, so its barely easier than just going to either (or both) site and looking at a profile.
A solution waiting for a problem?
Ian Hendry
CEO, WeCanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.biz
well, i think its cool, i didn't know that an app like this was "simple."
SocialWhois is cool. Only downside is that cyberstalking and identify theft just got easier.
Wow, amazingly accurate.
@Ian it uses twitter or friendfeed as a starting point. After typing in my Twitter username, every result was accurate and some not even listed specifically in my FriendFeed profile. So its doing something more.
I kinda like this service. I find myself more and more searching Google just for an individual's Twitter account or personal blog so that I can connect with them. SocialWhois seems like it will be quite helpful.
Posted by: shopfiber.myopenid.com
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February 5, 2009 9:51 AM
I picked up on SocialWhois shortly after launch. It's good, but there are some issues that need to be resolved, which I wrote about myself:
"If I was one of the guys behind SocialWhois, I’d be thinking about how much of a pain in the arse it is filling out yet another social profile, and consider just how much ground I’d be covering if I were to look at mashing up SocialWhois with something like Facebook, or similar."
Also, there's the potential for someone to claim someone else's identity, which is an even bigger problem for the more notable amongst us...
Have you tried http://snitch.name/? It helps you search for people's profiles on social sites like FaceBook, Flickr, LinkedIn, Twitter, MySpace, Hi5, Friendfeed and many more.
Example: http://snitch.name/index.html?q=Dionysios+Synodinos