Online Web Sleuthing Should Not Be This Easy!

Okay, I will admit that I love searching for information on the Internet, but sometimes things can be too easy. I was on one of my favorite property sale sites, stlouis.blockshopper.com, and when I was doing a search on someone, it instead redirected me to another site called spokeo.com. Okay, I thought I could try that one out, but when I did I was amazed what all I found. Not only did I find the person I was looking for, I found out their age, their spouse, their children, and a nice picture of their home (along with its estimated value.) I realize much of this is public information, so I had to do a search on myself. Sure enough I could find our address, ages, marital status, phone number, home value, home picture, and even my children's names (I am guessing from Facebook relationship listings.) Luckily they have an easy to use privacy link which allows you to remove your own listing, so I did so for myself, my wife and my children so they no longer appear on a search. I will have to admit their interface works extremely well and makes searching for people very easy. Putting all the real estate transactions on-line like on the blockshopper.com sites is one thing, putting your age, marital status and children's name on-line is another. Plus you do not even have to know what state you want to search, it will look at all of them and it is pretty easy to go through all the results state by state, and city by city until you find the best fit for that special "Bob Smith" you want.
 
Another nice site I found that works really well is 4shared.com. It combines a generous 10GB of free on-line storage with easy to send SendSpace or YouSendIt type URL's so you can easily share individual files with people without having to send huge attachments. Why mail that 50MB PowerPoint or PDF file to a dozen people when you can just store the file in your 4shared account and e-mail people the URL to access it? Plus the speed to both upload and download the files was very fast. ADrive.com may have 5 times the storage (50GB free!), but its Java based file management system seems primitive compared to the slick interface at 4shared.

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