WhitePages people search ( www.whitepages.com ) announced last week that they will add social network profiles from Twitter and Facebook to their people search engine.

Users will now be able to search for a person’s phone number and address as well as profile pages on Facebook and Twitter for people.

Whitepages hopes the addition of social network profiles in their people search results will enhance the services reputation as the most comprehensive and useful people search engine online.

Whitepages CEO Alex Algard stated: “Whether it’s social data, landlines, cell phones, or email address, WhitePages is committed to building the most comprehensive people search service on the Web.”

Social networks and regular search engines often fall short as effective people search tools due to their large indexes of data.

Users can benefit from niche people search engines like WhitePages. Over the past decade the Whitepages people search engine has enhanced is search to include nicknames and name relevancy matching.

The announcement to include social network profiles in the Whitepages people search is a preview of how social network information will eventually be included throughout the WhitePages search engine.

By the mid 2010, WhitePages hopes to expand the number of social network listings by adding social network profiles to their work and residential search results.

People can also add links to their own social network profiles by using WhitePages’ personal editing options.

[ Source: Market Wire ]

On August 13, 2009 Evan Ratliff, a writer for Wired Magazine, who had written about the faked deaths and intentional disappearances of other people in past articles, began his own hi-tech game of hide and go seek when he left San Francisco that evening on a travel adventure that involved evading being found for a whole month.

On August 14, 2009, almost 24 hours after Ratliff embarked on his adventure to disappear, Wired Magazine posted the following online message to readers: “Author Evan Ratliff Is on the Lam. Locate Him and Win $5,000.”

The invitation to take part in the manhunt for Evan Ratliff by Wired Magazine coincided with the publication of Wired’s September 2009 issue, which contained a page of mugshot-style pictures of Ratliff for readers to view.

People who joined the search for Evan Ratliff would have from August 15 and September 15, 2009 to locate him.

The contest was straightforward: Ratliff will try to disappear for a month under a new identity while Wired readers and others try to find him.

Ratliff’s editor at Wired, Nicholas Thompson was given complete access to Ratliff’s personal information, including: his real bank accounts; credit cards; phone records; social network accounts, and email addresses.

In addition, Thompson was given contact information for Ratliff’s friends so he could interview them. Thompson would then periodically reveal some of Ratliff’s personal information online for searchers who took part in the manhunt.

The search for Ratliff ignited Twitter discussions under the #vanish hash tag as well as Facebook groups and discussions on finding him. At one point the search for Ratliff generated 600 Twitter posts in a day.

From a recent Wired article, written by Ratliff on the event:

What had started as an exercise in escape quickly became a cross between a massively multiplayer online game and a reality show. A staggeringly large community arose spontaneously, splintered into organized groups, and set to work turning over every rock in Ratliff’s life. It topped out at 600 Twitter posts a day. The hunters knew the names of his cat sitter and his mechanic, his favorite authors, his childhood nicknames. They found every article he’d ever written; they found recent videos of him. They discovered and published every address he’d ever had in the US, from Atlanta to Hawaii, together with the full name and age of every member of his family.

Ratliff planned for his disappearing act for months in advance and used a combination of both hi and lo-tech tools and tactics to evade being located, including:

- letting his hair and beard grow out.

- using several different laptop computers.

- installing software to hide his web searches and registering numerous fake email addresses.

- a set of professionally designed business cards with a fake company name and the fake personal name of James Donald Gatz.

- two prepaid cell phones purchased with cash and prepaid gift cards for purchases.

- Just for Men beard-and-mustache dye along with numerous other disguising tools like glasses and hats.

- a $477 bank cashiers check for rent on an anonymous Las Vegas office.

- a combination of “head-fake” tactics and misdirections were used to throw his hunters off his path.

Evan Ratliff’s vanishing adventure took him from San Francisco on a zig-zag-criss-cross trip around the US to New Orleans, where he was eventually tracked down and located on September 8, 2009 by a computer programmer named Jeff Reifman who worked long distance with New Orleans resident and Naked Pizza owner Jeff Leach to find Ratliff.

Ratliff’s visits to the Naked Pizza website helped to verify his location in New Orleans where he was ultimately found.

Ernest Hemingway wrote: “There is nothing like the hunting of a man… and those who have hunted men and liked it have never cared for (hunting) anything else thereafter.”

And so it goes for all the people who set out to hunt and find Evan Ratliff.

To read the full intriguing and highly instructive story about how Evan Ratliff disappeared and how he was tracked and found, read his story on Wired.com.

You can also watch Evan Ratliff discuss his personal story in the video below.

ABC will air a preview tonight for a new television series called Find My Family at 9:30 eastern / 8:30 central time.

The show centers around finding and reuniting family members that have lost contact with each other.

The show relies on a team of researchers and the hosts Tim Green and Lisa Joyner help people searching for lost family members.

Each episode covers the story and search for mothers, fathers, daughters and sons who have lost contact for years and are reunited again.

Viewers will learn the background stories of the people who are searching for their lost relatives.

After gathering the background information, the Find My Family research begins the difficult task of searching through public archives and records to find the missing family.

Host Lisa Joyner makes the initial contact with the found family members to inform them that someone from their biological family is searching for them, while host Tim Green meets with the people who are doing the search.

You can watch a clip from Find My Family and read more about the series on ABC’s site @ Find My Family.

Cell phone technology, mobile applications and social networks make a powerful combination for tracking people. Ironically, most of the people being tracked do so willingly through their own use of these technologies.

Google’s announced that it will offer turn-by-turn navigation to users of the Motorola Droid, showing the precision with which cell phones are now able to pinpoint a person’s location.

Prosecutors can now use cell phone GPS records to prove a defendant has been near the location of a crime scene. Divorce lawyers have used cell phone records to prove a spouse has been cheating. Services like Loopt and Google Latitude allow people to find the current locations of friends and family in their networks.

Although these mobile people tracking services can be handy for users, they can also be abused by people with bad intentions.

Last June, an Arizona man claimed that hist Twitter posts he made while on vacation may have helped a robber who stole expensive video equipment from his home.

Services like Loopt let people share their locations online with other approved devices. Loopt provides safety and privacy tips to users, but the decision of how much personal information to reveal is up to individual users.

Private investigators and attorneys are now frequently using phone records to prove guilt in both civil and criminal court cases.

A 1999 FCC law required all cell phones to come equipped with GPS technology by 2005 to assist with emergency calls.

Some phones still rely on satellites for tracking, which makes them less accurate than other navigation tools such as a Garmin, which can find its location within a few meters. Environmental conditions can also limit the accuracy of tracking devices, like cloudy weather or being indoors.

However, mobile technology will only more precise and potentially invasive in the future.

Source: CNBC.com

The Flickr photo sharing network has introduced a new people tagging tool that allows users to find a person in pictures by name.

Flickr has also improved their privacy settings, so people can opt out of being identified in pictures. How effective Flickr will be at implementing these new privacy controls is anyone’s guess.

The new people tagging tool lets you identify individual people in photos by drawing boxes around their faces. Flickr then lets you identify each person by name. If the person is a registered member on Flickr, the tagging system suggests the member’s name to you as you type the tag.

Once a person is tagged, finding them in searches is easier. Flickr will now be able to show you where the person is located inside the pictures, which is really helpful in searching group shots.

Flickr currently reports over 40 million registered users on its service.

People-tagging technology is already available on other picture-sharing networks like Google’s Picasa and Facebook.

Flickr’s people search tool isn’t as advanced as Picasa. Google launched its people search tool for pictures in 2008 and upgraded its search last month.

However, Flickr’s people-tagging and search allows more privacy controls for users by allowing them to opt out of being identified in pictures. People who are not members of Flickr can also be tagged in pictures, but they will need to approve the ID before it appears in Flickr’s system.

Whereas on Facebook people often get tagged in an unflattering picture that they didn’t approve of. Once a person is tagged in a Facebook photo, that picture along with your name gets tied to your Facebook profile. The tagged picture then will appear in Facebook image searches, whether you want it to or not.

People who want to monitor the tagging activity associated with their name can review their Recent Activity page. Every time they’re tagged in a photo, there will be a notice in on their Recent Activity feed informing them as to who tagged them, and showing a link to the tagged photo.

Source: Web Monkey

Google Earth is being used with CCTV video to view people and vehicles in real time by students from the Georgia Institute of Technology.

The potential and possible use of this new search technology will be viewed with excitement by some people and fear by others.

Right now the technology makes the people and vehicles anonymous and virtual; but the future of this technology along with the proliferation of CCTV cameras and RFID tagging technology could make for an advanced people search and car tracking system.

You can watch a video of this new search and tracking technology below:

Source: Gizmodo.com

Here is a great mother and daughter reunion story that shows how online people search efforts can reunite a mother with her long lost daughter after almost 40 years —

A woman whose kids were taken from her by the East German Stasi secret police was recently reunited with one of them after nearly 4 decades.

Petra Hoffmann, now 55 years old, was reunited this week with her daughter Mandy Reinhardt, now 38 years old, for the first time since the East German Communist police seized her after she was born.

Mandy was born in 1971. Her father was a political dissident who had served prison time for speaking against life under the rule of Communist East Germany.

“The Youth Welfare people came to my door one day, said I was not a fit person to be a mother,” said Mrs Hoffmann.

“They put me and her into a home. Days later, against my will, Mandy was given up for adoption.”

After the Berlin wall fell she began the hunt for her children.

She hounded government authorities, put notices in newspapers, asked for help from old friends. But the Communist police had destroyed most of the paperwork and her search went nowhere.

However, six weeks ago, a letter came from Berlin to Petra which read: “You don’t know me at all, but I believe you are my mother.” Mandy had been searching for her mother since 1992 after her foster parents she was given to informed her that she was adopted.

Mandy had searched for her mother on the internet and wrote to government authorities for help, but ultimately found a plea that her mother had posted on a website, which led to the communication and recent reunion between the two.

Source: Telegraph.co.uk

If you’ve been online for any amount of time, if you know your way around the Internet and are generally aware of how the system works, if you have established your online presence and left your mark behind, you would definitely be guilty of doing a vanity search at some point of time. And if you haven’t, well, all I can say is that you’re missing out on one of the simple and unexpected pleasures that the Internet offers.

A vanity search on Google or any other search engine throws up the names of sites that feature your name on the net – on online networking sites, as bylines if you’ve written articles or have your own blog, and elsewhere too. Of course, if you share the name of a celebrity, then you’re out of luck because you have to provide more detailed search terms if you want to filter your name from the millions of hits that a celebrity’s name is bound to return.

They’re called vanity searches, but very often, they help do much more than just feed your ego. When you search for your name online, you can see what others are saying about you, or if they’re talking about you at all. Sometimes the latter may turn out to be a blessing in disguise, because, as the saying goes, no news is akin to good news.

If people are talking about you, you better hope that it’s all good, because when it’s not flattering, you don’t have much of a chance at either retribution or rebuttal.

Because of the cloak of anonymity that it offers, the Internet is a place where you can slander people’s good names and more often than not, get away with it. So unless you wish and are prepared to see the matter through, to go to court and procure an order that forces service providers and web hosts to reveal the identity of the people who dragged your good name through the mud, you’re most likely left with no satisfactory course of retaliation.

Even otherwise, it’s good to keep track of what people are saying about you, especially if you tend to live life in the limelight and if your actions and people’s perception of them could cause inconveniences or hindrances in your life. A word of caution though – don’t take every random mention of your name to heart, whether good or bad. It’s just not worth it, not when there’s bound to be something new in a few days.

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This guest article was written by Adrienne Carlson, who regularly writes on the topic of forensic scientist schools. Adrienne welcomes your comments and questions at her email address: adrienne.carlson83@yahoo.com.

The 123People.com people search has been added to the Skipease main Free People Search page.

123People.com makes finding someone easy and is one of the web’s best people search engines at the moment. 123People can search for a person across social networks, people search sites, blogs and deep web public record searches.

123People searches for people on the top social networks like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and other social networks. The 123People search also searches the person’s name on web search engines like Google and Bing.

In addition, 123People can search other online sources like pictures, blogs, MS Word documents etc. all from one people search engine.

Personas is a people search engine created by Aaron Zinman from MIT’s Media Lab. You search for your name or someone else’s name on Personas and the search engine searches the web for the context associated with it and returns a graphical profile of your online persona.

Taking someone’s name as input Personas then culls the web for information to characterize the person. Personas does this by associating the name with a set of categories created from a massive index of personal information. The search process is shown visually with each level of the processing search with the final search result showing a personal profile associated with the given name.

Personas shows the way the web sees someone’s name online. For people who have common names, the results will vary.

You can watch a demo of the Personas search engine on the YouTube video below or visit the site for yourself @ Personas.

Source: TechCrunch