Ned Notes


Ideas in Motion:

Article re-printed from Seattle Business Monthly (no online version available)

Seattle Business Monthly will forgive me re-printing hisWHITEPAGES GO WIKI: During the past few years, the age-old physical "white pages" book has virtually disappeared with the success of Whitepages.com. This month, however, the digital directory is being reinvented yet again as an interactive "wiki."

The community-driven wiki model, which allows users to manage their own listings to keep them as up-to-date as possible, has been the company's top priority for years, says product manager Ned Hayes. Also new to the site in 2008 is the addition of cell-phone numbers, e-mail addresses and social networks. Unlike relatively unmonitored sites such as Facebok, where user information has to be taken with a grain of salt, Hayes says Whitepages.com's security features will make it very difficult for malicious users to hack in and pose as other people.

All users, Hayes says, must go through an ID verification process and provide information such as their phone numbers or addresses from the last few places they have lived, which are then compared against Whitepages' existing database.

Whitepages.com currently has contact information online for more than 80 percent of all households in the United States, but most of the customers served represent an older demographic.

With the new model, however, Hayes predicts the ounger wiki-savvy generation will be drawn to the amount of control they can have over their personal data.

-- Caitlin Hostetter

information on this page was last posted on March 24, 2008

 


Reaching Me: Ned Hayes · Seattle WA · 206.321.7981 · ned AT nednotes.com
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