People Search with yoName

April 25, 2007 in Web by Carsten Pötter | 10 comments

yoName is a Californian based people search engine which launched last week if I am not wrong.

yoName is searching social networks (Facebook, Friendster, Xanga, Match, Digg, MySpace, and LinkedIn) for people’s names, email addresses, and user names. The number of searchable networks is quite impressive actually, though users can’t limit search to just one network. Say you are looking for someone with a really common name but don’t know their email address a search in all networks would generate to many results. Actually there is no way to limit searches at all.

I have tried looking for some people I got to know at BarCamp Frankfurt last weekend. While I have got some positive results yoName seems to have problems with umlauts. It simply doesn’t recognise them. If I search for Carsten Pötter, my last name is omitted in the search results; I just see the first nine results for each network, none of them is me. Umlauts seem to be a problem for many US based startups, though.

Search by email seems to be an interesting approach. However I find it to be questionable at best. If users search for a person by email an email will be sent to that person. It looks like this:

YO! You’ve been searched…

This is a one-time message from www.yoName.com. We are sending you this message because someone entered [email address] into yoName to search for your online profiles. yoName allows you to search for anyone across all the social networking sites. Use yoName to search for friends at sites like MySpace, Friendster, Facebook, Xanga and many more.

Your friends at yoName.com
www.yoName.com

A bad marketing idea, I think. I’d be shocked if I got an email like this one. Also their mission statement is probably supposed to be funny; make up your own mind:

Our goal is to create a site that brings people closer together within the online community, and then to have Yahoo! or Google buy that site from us for $300 billion dollars.

yoName is just offering people search, there is no other feature available. Quite frankly, I am not impressed.

[via Webware]

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  1. Ozilla’s avatar

    Ozilla on April 28, 2007 at 22:19

    I actually learned of yoName through one of those emails you describe. I have been using regularly ever since to supllement my google searches. I use the email feature a lot and get great results and I’ve found some lost friends on linked through the site. If are having issues with your searches you should email support@yoname.com. I emailed them a while back because I wanted to search other social networks and I was told they are adding a bunch. They also told me the site is still in beta.

  2. Carsten Pötter’s avatar

    Carsten Pötter on April 28, 2007 at 22:38

    I am sure that yoName is the right choice for some people, though I am just not impressed. Maybe they will add some more features in the future and it will be a great service but at the moment I can’t see a reason why I should use it.

  3. Adi’s avatar

    Adi on April 29, 2007 at 12:59

    I don’t like the resemblance between their methods and spam:
    http://dotmad.blogspot.com/2007/04/yoname-as-possible-spam-resource.html

  4. Carsten Pötter’s avatar

    Carsten Pötter on April 29, 2007 at 13:11

    I have just read your article, Adi. I have tried searching by email again and yes, you’re right. No email got sent to me again, so it’s in a database. Grrr.

  5. Gill’s avatar

    Gill on July 18, 2007 at 23:22

    i’ve been a frequenter of this site for quite some time now and i must say that i’m addicted, its really cool and they have alot of features added on since when you have commented, their find a freind service has gotten me in touch with people that i have not seen in years, its a great site.

  6. Carsten Pötter’s avatar

    Carsten Pötter on July 19, 2007 at 00:56

    I will have a look at it again and see what has changed.

  7. Timmy Cairns’s avatar

    Timmy Cairns on July 30, 2007 at 14:56

    The likes of ‘Gill’ always turn up in blog comments praising yoname.

  8. Carsten Pötter’s avatar

    Carsten Pötter on July 30, 2007 at 18:42

    Do they? Maybe Gill really likes the site so much. ;)

  9. shwingtastic’s avatar

    shwingtastic on August 8, 2007 at 20:29

    who knows the point is its a really great site and has alot of useful features and i for one enjoy using it and no longer experience the hassle of finding friends or getting in touch with ones you havn’t seen in a while

  10. Tim’s avatar

    Tim on November 2, 2007 at 23:04

    The one time emails don’t bother me. It’s a great service and free. I even use the websearch feature quite a bit. I’m in recruiting and for me it’s a great resource.