Friday, February 24

zoominfo - "Don't Be (too) Evil"

Ever try to do a reference check on someone you are interviewing - and you immediately go to google or the nearest search engine to find all the information that person. After a few checks, you find out the company he/she worked at does not exist or the press clipping where a person with that name has been indicted and you are not sure how to best use this information.

Enter zoominfo - a new service that aggregates all the disparate information on the web into one quick summary on work experiences, business relationships, coworkers, educational history and such. For a quick example, take a look at my web summary from zoominfo. Heck, even George Bush has his summary listed. Now, the source of this informaton is all derived on the web - and the validity of this information is as reliable as the ease of publishing. But imagine if someone with no moral scruples wanted to create a smear campaign on an individual - and could create associated links between that person and some other unsavory individual (consider a recent political campaign where a Florida Democratic candidate for governor was "connected" to Tom Delay). Potentially, this system would make that connection and consider the candidate a "colleague".

zoominfo provides means for resolving the issue by owning your identity and allowing you the ability to try out there service and manage your identity on their system. Interesting business model - especially if the service takes off, more people use it and require individuals to manage their "zoominfo"...

Tags: digital identity, zoominfo

1 comment:

Aldon Hynes said...

Hmm... Doing a quick search, I see that Aldon Hynes has six different entries, Sanford Dickert has five different entries and Ned Lamont has four different entries.

The six entries for Aldon Hynes all seem to be talking about me, however, it does have a few entries about me being involved with Meetups. I hosted Meetups, just like thousands of other people around the country.

Likewise, there is a webpage that lists Sanford Dickert with a link to a bio which sounds very similar to your own bio. The line after the link talks about Blackberries so they seem to think one of your personae works at Blackberry.

I can't find any way to easily let them know that the six personae they've constructed for me are actually the same typist.

It looks like there data isn't all that good and they need to clean up considerably if they want to get traction.

My two cents