Upscoop was released by Rapleaf, a portable ratings system for commerce. Upscoop is a tool to get the scoop on all your friends. They will be joining number of other startups that are trying to add a Meta layer above social networks. Dump your contact list into Upscoop and discover which of your friends are on social networks including MySpace, Friendster, Hi5, and dozens more. I would be interested to know which other social networks they are referring to by saying that they will scoop friends from other dozens more networks. I wonder if they also scoop from social news sites such as digg, reddit, techtagg and others.

Well it is true that there are so many social networks right now. It would be difficult for anyone to track down their friends activities. However, are you willing to give up your username and password for your email accounts so that Upscoop can discover where your friends are? Well I would certainly not do that right now but I will be watching them. They need to gain the trust from their visitors in order for them to provide their credentials to this site. Upscoop basically takes your username and password for AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo or Gmail and it will connect into your account to scoop your contact lists. Then it will go into their millions of profiles that they have from other social networks and search for your friends. The search and the site seem to be a lot slow now. Upscoop will then return the results with all your friends mapped to different social networks. Hence you will find out where your buddies are and which services they are using. Well I am sure some of my friends would like to keep their online activity private and I can appreciate that. So some people may find this a breach in privacy.

Seems like an interesting service though but I am very sure that they will have difficulty selling this to their visitors. I think Upscoop should allow people to upload their contact list or enter multiple email address in a form instead of having to give up their personal email account login information. If Upscoop offers an alternative then I believe more people will try the service. Also this will make them feel comfortable. Once they get people to be comfortable then they can add features such as this to get account information from people. Anyhow, I wish Upscoop all the best.

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