A new service came out of beta this week 123people.com – in their words:

123people is a real time people search tool that looks into nearly every corner of the Web. Using our proprietary search algorithm, you can find comprehensive and centralized people related information consisting of images, videos, phone numbers, email addresses, social networking and Wikipedia profiles and much more.

Now I tried a few searches including myself, whilst it was kind of frightening just how much about me is online it didn’t pull up anything I wasn’t aware of.

It seems to be most effective for people in Austria, Germany, Switzerland and the US… so for purely academic purposes I tried searching for Jessica Alba which it suggested on its front page.

Wow.

Directory listings, Social Networking pages, Email addresses and phone numbers to suit all of your stalking reconnection needs.

Sure, most of this stuff was easily accessible anyway, its not doing anything really new apart from the way it presents the information and the accuracy compared with a google search of the same name.

Its only purpose is to locate people, so you avoid all the pointless links from other search engines and get straight to ways of getting back in contact.

useful, yes if you need to contact someone – scary, yes… try it, search for yourself…

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I’m a geek, I think we established that… as a geek, I like to try new sites and applications when they come out, often discarding them if they don’t offer any real business benefit.

Twitter was one of those. I set up a personal account… I could see how it was useful for certain types of internet users, to share ideas… I got that sometimes it was the best way of rapidly publishing information when you need to share updates with friends/colleagues or customers – like live blogging from a conference to say “this is on at stand so n so in 20mins” – in the US the SMS updates are free – but I didn’t really get how it was useful to most businesses.

I realised something yesterday, and I hold my hand up, I should of pieced it all together sooner..

EVERY status update on twitter (some people call it a “tweet”) gets its own URL – take a recent update from us about GimPhoto for example.

Yes, the link has a “Nofollow” tag… but… there is plenty of discussion about how the different engines actually use nofollow.

I’m also pretty sure that my rapidly rising traffic isn’t just because of my amazing writing style (ahem), I’ll be having a dig in Analytics, but I’m sure Twitter has driven traffic to this site.

Add to this the following post about Twitter and SEO (You should all subscribe to Blogstorm btw)

It makes me think that Twitter is not only a great way to communicate to a wider group of people (it is searchable) but it must help with SEO.

I’m NOT an SEO guru, but I’d love to hear from some of you that are!

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Click the artwork to dload a copy of my Slinky CD 🙂 – 100 copies were pressed up n given out to Slinky VIPs last week – winner!

Friday night, if you’re about I’ll be up at the Bumbles reunion with Chris + Simon M then headed over to play 130-3 at Frenzy. have a good weekend y’all!

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…no not the Obama thing, as great as that is…

…smokers are evil.

Seriously… ish… I was amused and confused to see that Redbridge council has voted to ban potential foster parents who smoke from adopting children.

There is an health n safety type issue here, its proven that second hand smoke is particularly damaging to a child – so why should they place them at a higher risk location?

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The next date for my talk “The Social Web in 10 Slides” is November the 13th.

I’ve been really inspired by the reaction to this talk, both in person and the webinar version I presented a couple of weeks ago.

What’s in the talk?

I cover all aspects of the social web from a business perspective.

The Social Web in 10 Slides

Why Social Networking matters
Overview of the main players
Taking the social out of social networking
Usage and Users
Monetizing the Social Web
Case study
Interest is not Intent
Do’s n Don’ts
Corporate and Policy considerations
The future of the Social Graph

BONUS

Social Bookmarking – delivering traffic through the social web.

It’s an Intergage client seminar (free if you’re an Intergage client) at the Burley Manor Hotel, there are limited places available to paying attendees – to request a place on the seminar, please use this booking form.

If you’d be interested in me presenting this to your company or business group, please contact me for more details.

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Ut oh… I’m off in 4hrs and forgot to sort a costume out… any ideas?

Whilst looking I found this, genius!

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Movember that is..

Still lost?

Every year, the charity Movember encourages guys not to shave to raise awareness and funds for the Prostate Cancer Charity – I blogged about it after seeing it in Oz last year.

And see the comments here… Mr Marky P, you said you’d be in as did james (boss permitting)

So, shall we Mo?

It starts tomo… answers on a comment please below.

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