One of the key aspects to social media is having a profile name. If you are trying to find someone, they may make it easy for you by using the same profile name in every social network in which they participate. For example, I am nearly always davidpwhelan or davidwhelan, assuming those profiles are available. But even if you know that, you may not be aware of all of the places where the person you are researching may have used that profile name. The obvious sites – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Myspace – are easy to check but you may want to look further.
Knowem is an interesting site that queries more than a hundred social media sites for someone using a particular name. You can run the search over common blogging platforms, bookmarking sites (like Delicious.com), and many other categories. Knowem is actually a site where you can register a profile name across many sites, but (like WHOIS sites for determining domain name ownership), the look up feature is a great research tool. Once you know where there might be information, you can go directly to those sites and use their search tools to see what’s publicly available.
