Finding information about a particular subject is easy with the myriad of search engines available. But what about people? Looking for someone? Lost touch with a friend or family member? Not sure if they are on Facebook, LinkedIn, Xing, MySpace or somewhere else? Or perhaps you feel a little more introspective, after all – who are you? What information is available about you? Perhaps you may have concerns about privacy.

Soon, many of these questions may well be answered with the UK launch of 123people on 27th November 2008.123people describes itself as “a multimedia people search site” and offers a simple, clear and quick way of finding and collating information about people, from multiple information sources.

Aggregating Public Information

123people combines information from search engines with a number of other publicly available information sources including Flickr, Wikipedia, Youtube, Facebook, and LinkedIn in a neatly presented page showing web links, images, videos, social network profiles, emails, phone numbers, blogs, documents, IM and other useful information.

123people say of their services “123people is also socially interactive, applying crowd wisdom to search results. Users can rate and add information to every single search result, giving it more relevance with details that are not yet found on the Internet, taking the quality of people search to the next level. An “Update Newsletter Service” provides users information about new search results on the Internet. ”

The site initially launched in parts of Europe and recently launched in the US and seems to be quickly gaining a foothold as the services it offers increase in popularity.

Some of the features of 123people include

• 123people aggregates people-related data
• User can tag search results and give them more relevance
• Includes popular social media profiles (e.g. Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Xing, Friendster, HiFive, FlickR, Bebo, Blogger, LastFM,)
• Instant Messenger profiles and Microblogs, such as, AIM and twitter
• Tagclouds
• Biographies
• Phone numbers, addresses and emails
• News page results from The Telegraph, The Guardian, Times online and The Sun.
• 123people is available in English and German and soon in Spanish and French.

Giving it a run

One of the first things I did of course was type my own name into the service and a number of my mug shots appeared, together with a number of other people by the same name. Many of the areas correctly pulled information about me which is a promising start – as well as an eye opener as to how much information about me there is! If you are familiar with the work of the comedian Dave Gorman this service may have saved him some time on his quest to find other namesakes..

An interesting aside I discovered was that you can also type in other information to search for, such as a postcode or telephone number and the site will return relevant matches. Running the same search in Wink and ZoomInfo shows how much more information is on offer – on ZoomInfo I barely register in the results and in Wink, although I do appear first in the list (woo hoo!!), there is very little information about me compared to what I know is available online from 123people.

Russell Perry, CEO of 123people, says “We are out to change the way Web users search and discover people information.” and he may well be right.

To visit the site click on the link: www.123people.co.uk

Further Reading

• 123people launches U.S. site to help you find anyone
• 123People searches the Social Web
• People Search Site 123people Goes International
• 123people.com optimizes Web-Based People Search
• Finding People with 123People
• 123people.com blog