The PeekScores of the Political Blogosphere’s Top 30 Names
PeekYou Products
Media Round-Up, PeekScore “Top Models” List
We just wanted to take a second to offer a quick and fun round-up of some coverage PeekYou has recently received. Over at our PeekScore blog – where we measure and rank notable individuals from all professions, and various groupings, by the sizes of their digital footprints – we recently posted an entry ranking the world’s current Top Models (well, female fashion models, to be precise) by their PeekScores. A few different outlets carried the list, the links for which are below.
Examiner
Apparel Search
AskMen.com
Fashion Indie
Gossip Center
Celebrity-Gossip.net
Hindustan Times
You can see the list in question over at the PeekScore blog by clicking here, and you can visit the blog in general – where we have all sorts of fun lists, covering all sorts of topics – by clicking through here.
LuckyMag.com Features Our PeekScore List of Fashion’s Top Creative Directors
Earlier this week, over at our PeekScore blog we ran a list of the The PeekScores of the Top Fashion Houses’ Creative Directors. The folks over at LuckyMag.com reported on the list, and provided a nice accompanying slideshow along with the list’s findings.
You can head over to the PeekScore blog and see the original entry here, and head on over to Lucky’s website and see their piece by clicking here.
PeekYou.com Integrates PeerIndex Scores
We are happy to announce that we have recently integrated PeerIndex’s influence score on PeekYou.com! Users of our website will now see PeerIndex scores listed under the Twitter Section of Search Result pages as well as on Individual Listing pages (displayed only when our search engine is able to match and identify a publicly available Twitter URL). Below are some screenshots of the integration in action:
PeekYou Search Results Page
PeekYou Individual Listing Page
“We’re very excited to have PeerIndex’s influence scores readily available to our users on PeekYou.com,” says Raj Ajrawat, General Manager of PeekYou.com. “For us, it’s about providing our users with better content and better context to their searches, and we believe this integration will further our efforts in providing our users with a great people search experience.”
PeekYou currently offers a different type of measurement score, named PeekScore, that focuses on quantifying an individual’s digital footprint and presence online. Our goal is to provide an individual’s PeerIndex score in conjunction with their PeekScore, to help our users understand where individuals may rank in terms of digital presence on the web. “We feel that having both scores readily available will make it easier and more relevant for our users when they conduct searches on PeekYou.com, since they compliment each other so well,” continues Ajrawat.
What is PeerIndex?
PeerIndex scores are a measure of web authority that are calculated when individuals participate in meaningful exchanges of information online. According to their FAQ, “these exchanges take place all over the social web, whether it’d be a shared link on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. We also believe that the type of information we share reveals a lot about who we are, whom we know, and what we know – after all, we tend to talk about the things we care about, are most knowledgeable in, and with people interested in similar subjects.”
“The PeerIndex algorithm recognizes the importance of speed and quantity by which we spot, share (and thus approve) content on any specific topic. Our choice of content recommendations can thus be used as a proxy to measure our knowledge, or authority, in a specific subject area. We also take into account the relationships we build on various social media platforms. The impact of those relationships also affects our authority exhibited on the web. Your authority on a subject is affirmed when the content you share is approved – i.e. Retweeted, Facebook Shared, +1’ed or commented on, by someone else that is an authority on the subject.”
For more information about PeerIndex, check out their FAQ and visit their site. Let us know if you have any questions about the integration!
Cheers,
The PeekYou.com Team
How Do I Increase My PeekScore?
PeekScore is a number from one to ten which quantifies, at a glance, an individual’s online prominence, or “digital footprint.” An individual’s PeekScore will grow or shrink depending upon the quantity of information he or she makes publicly available on the Web during a given period of time.
Increasing your PeekScore is rather simple. The more content you share and provide online, the higher your PeekScore will be. While many public figures will have large PeekScores without having to directly contribute much to their digital footprints, for the vast majority of individuals the size of their PeekScore is almost entirely within their own control.
Below is a condensed list of different ways one can increase his or her PeekScore:
New PeekYou Search Results Section: Google+
The PeekYou.com Development Team is hard at work making some underlying code improvements to our code framework to ensure that we can handle the growth we are seeing these days (yesterday was a record with approximately 287,000 visits in one day!). That being said, we have also made some improvements on the front-end for our users, you, as well. On Search Result pages, you will now see a new section aptly named “Google+” that will display publicly available and publicly shared Google+ profiles that are set to be shared with the whole web.
As Google+ is still a young (but rapidly growing) social network, you may not see results on every page. However, we are noticing that most common name search pages will have Google+ profiles show up.
Expect more updates such as this one as well as better content as we continue our growth.
Sincerely,
The PeekYou.com Team
PeekYou Featured on SemanticWeb.com Regarding Search Engine Technology & Future of PeekYou
Today, PeekYou’s CEO Michael Hussey, GM of Product Josh Mackey and GM of PeekYou.com Raj Ajrawat were featured on www.semanticweb.com regarding PeekYou’s search engine technology, our matching algorithm and the vision for PeekYou in the future. Here is a small excerpt from the article:
“Using public data on the Web, the company has been building an index matching URLs to individuals. That is, it has developed its own algorithm to look at web pages for specific things that help it identify whether that data is associated with a particular individual – real names or user names, outbound links to other social sites or blogs, work or school affiliations, for example. To accomplish that, it has to be smart enough to match to an individual a LinkedIn profile that lists the user’s region with a Myspace one that includes the user’s city but not region – oh, and let’s raise the stakes by doing it for individuals with common names like John Smith. Some 50 or 60 queries might have to be run to match up and two given URLs.”
To read the entire article by Jennifer Zaino, head over to www.semanticweb.com.
PeekYou Education Series: Educating Users & Empowering Consumers
Over the next few months, PeekYou will be rolling out a series of blog posts known as the “PeekYou Education Series.” Our goal with these posts is to give our users the ability to understand how search engines like PeekYou find public information online and to raise the general level of awareness that users should have when it comes to the information that we share and consume everyday. We feel that many times our users and other individuals across the web do not necessarily understand how keeping their privacy settings open, or sending out a tweet to the public web, can be picked up by various sources across the web. All of us here at PeekYou feel its important that users get as much education and information as possible about how all of these various components of the web work, allowing them to make a better, more educated decision when it comes to sharing information online and posting information to the public web.
This series was sparked by the comments and feedback from users that we receive everyday, mostly from users who are upset or shocked to find so much information about themselves in one location. While we think it is not a bad thing at all to be public and to share your information with others freely, we want to ensure (through these posts) that consumers and users have the tools and knowledge to navigate the online world. After all, knowledge is power, and we want to empower our users with information.
Further to this point, we also see a big shift happening online, whereby people are starting to recognize “Identity” as being separate by connected to “Privacy”: You can have a robust online identity and yet still remain private in many ways. This shift happening across the web is one of the reasons our CEO Michael Hussey and our GM of Product Josh Mackey recently attended the PII 2011 Conference (privacy identity innovation) in San Francisco, CA last week.
Stay tuned for more posts in the PeekYou Education Series that will be going on throughout the summer. Feel free to engage with us through Twitter and our Facebook page, as well as our blog.
PeekYou is Pleased to Anounce our Brand New Social Analytics API
PeekYou is very pleased and excited to announce the launch of of our brand new Social Analytics API. Powered by our friends at 3scale, the API’s technology identifies and maps an individual digital footprint, then structures, categorizes, and analyzes the public content for our social listening and analytics partners, such as market leader Radian6.
“We are excited to supply a unique set of insights and scores to our partners, and are very proud that we are setting the standard of delivering non-personally identifiable information through a process that respects consumers’ private data and platform Terms of Service,” says Josh Mackey, our GM of Product.
For more information, please visit http://developer.peekyou.com and follow @PeekYou
PeekYou CEO Michael Hussey Featured on MyFOX NY Street Talk – March 5, 2011
PeekYou’s CEO, Michael Hussey, sat down with Tai Hernandez of MyFOX NY to discuss social media issues and online privacy. Michael made a great point about Facebook giving users the controls they need to manage their own privacy online and that users need to be aware of the options that they have when it comes to online privacy and information sharing. You can watch the whole video on MyFOX NY’s website here.
Let us know what you think!