If I were my college's development person looking for previously-unknown alumni to invite to a local event, I'd be loving Ark right now.
(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)
Nobody should own Ark. TechCrunch reported today that the well-seeded people search startup rebuffed a probe from Facebook to acquire the company. Thank goodness.
Ark is yet another stab at an old unsolved need: A site that searches all the social networks to find the people you're looking for. This is most notably not something that Google can do, as Google cannot search within the structured and closed databases of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and so on. (It should have better luck with Google+, assuming you're logged in.)
Previously I have covered companies like Spock (now iSearch), which aimed to do a similar thing. But many high-flying people search companies got the timing and the mix wrong: They peaked before Facebook was big, and they focused on helping users find public figures, not friends.
Ark has the stalk-your-friends thing going on, b... [Read more]
via CNET http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/cnet/NnTv/~3/btT-cnCPr_w/
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