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YouTube for Finding Old Friends?

SearchTalk

by Christi Lundquist

Did you know that you could actually use social networks or photo and video sharing sites to locate people from your past? It doesn't normally occur to people that the sites could be useful in finding people, but they are actually a great tool in finding current information. Some sites are even offering to combine online social networking identities, which could even make it easier to use when searching for a person.

As far as YouTube, I stumbled across a couple of old friends, simply by accident. It may sound a little strange, and I wasn't actually looking for my old friends from high-school, but there they were on YouTube. I'll spare them the embarrassment of sharing the video and we'll just say it was late-night karaoke, and leave it at that! Interestingly enough, the video was taken at a local area hotspot, and it let me know that they still lived in the old neighborhood. I wouldn't have guessed finding friends on YouTube could be so easy, but hey, if it works, it's a great tool to use when initially starting a search. Start with first and last names, combinations of first names of friends or relatives. In my case, it would have been found under the first names of the two singing sisters. It sounds like a long-shot, but it just takes a few moments to search, and could be worth the time.

Once I had the sister's names and where I believed they were located, I would actually begin to search for them using databases. I would run an initial search using a database website like Voom People or People Finders, and see if the results match up to anything remotely familiar. If so, then I could purchase the full page reports, each showing exactly how to get in contact with them again. Many results show up to 20 years of address history, making it very easy to match up the dates that you knew them, and contact them at their current location.

Many different types of information show up on some of the reports, and can be very useful if you are in need of finding a relative. In the case of the YouTube find, two of the women in the video are sisters. Since there was a link to someone's username, and from their profile I was able to find a MySpace page. From there, I was able to find some of their friends, and contact another friend we had in common. Finding people is actually really easy, and once you have determined the general area in which the person is currently located, plug that information into a people search database.

In the past, people relied on paper trails to lead them to a person. Now, in the world of internet and instant information, we can not only follow their paper trail, but their web trail. People use the internet to share pictures, blog, join communities, business, journals, and other things that log a web trail. With this type of internet usage, there are usernames, real names, personal information, interests, and other information that can be accessed by users, and make you – and others, easier to find.

Apr 27, 2007

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