Spock - The People Search Engine
October 26th, 2007 by Stephen Cronin (1,095 views)I’ve just been having a look at Spock, the people search engine. I found it very interesting, but before I get into my findings, it’s important to note what Spock is not - it is not another a social network. On their about page, they state:
Spock is not a social network. Don’t get us wrong, we love social networks. We just think that there are already plenty of great options out there for sharing among friends. Spock is a people search application - once you find who you are looking for, go ahead and click through to see where they are on the web.
Spock finds information about people from the internet, including from social networks such as MySpace and LinkedIn. The idea is you can then find all information about a person in a single place. It’s also possible for logged in users to add information directly.
To find people you can search by name or by tag (and there is an Advanced Search function too). When you find someone, you’ll get everything Spock knows about that person, including links to external sites, tags, related people and news.
Since I mostly write about issues related to WordPress, I thought I’d try it out by doing a search for Matt Mullenweg, creator of WordPress. His profile exists and I learnt a few things about what he’s interested in (wasabi!) from his tags. There are also links to his LinkedIn and Friendster profiles, so I can check him out there.
It also possible to add a widget to your site for people found on Spock. I’ve included Matt’s here as an example (most have photos, but not Matt’s):
The service is still in Beta and it needs to mature a little. For example, if I search the WordPress tag, I get 43 people, but Matt’s not one of them. It does list several people I know, such as Douglas Karr, Mark Jaquith, Avinash Kumar, Aaron Brazell, Mark Ghosh (in that order), but of course Matt should be in the list, at the top.
One of the great things about Spock is that if you find things like this, you can fix it up (if you are logged in). See the Wordpress in Matt’s widget above? I added that! (don’t mention the capitalisation, I just add the existing tag to Matt). He’s still not showing in the results for WordPress yet, but I assume there’s a lag and he soon will be. The only issue I see is that I’m not sure how Spock can decide where to place Matt in the list.
One positive sign about Spock is that I’m listed on it. Seriously, I mean that! Let me explain: When I first heard of Spock a month or so ago, I wasn’t listed. There were 13 other Stephen Cronins but not me. Well, now I’m listed - it seems they picked me up from LinkedIn.
To me, this is a great sign that Spock is headed in the right direction. They are proactively building their database, not just relying on end users to fill in the gaps. If they can find and add me, maybe they’ve found you too. You better go check!
But although their proactiveness is a great sign, for Spock to be a truly valuable service it needs people to get behind it and improve the information they have. If this happens, it will be very useful. So go ahead and get involved!
(This is a sponsored post)
Tags: internet, social networks
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Spock looks pretty interesting, but once you get past the novelty I don’t know how usefull it will be.
Carter, I think it has definite possibilities. At first I was thinking, “here’s another social site”. It would have been really hard for them to make that work, but if they can get all the links for someone in one place, that will be useful (at least to me). It seems like that are trying hard to make that happen.
However, I think that for Spock to be truly great, it will need the support of the average user to get involved and add things they find missing, etc.. That will probably be their biggest challenge, but I’m willing to give them a chance.
Sounds intriguing. This could be a very handy service. I’m in their database, surprisingly . I can see what you mean about everyone needing to add the missing pieces.
Tim, Thanks for stopping by. It will be interesting to see how it pans out. I’m convinced it’s a good idea, but without the missing pieces it will have limited value. I’m hoping it does take off.
I have the same feelings. It is a good idea but the real question is can it be executed. I’ll be checking on it to see how it goes.
Hi Myspace, Thanks for commenting - I’ll be watching them too. I hope they do make a go of it, but time will tell..
Great post! It looks very good to me, but, after the big ‘ooh, ahhh’ of everybody coming across the idea, i do think it’ll die out. I suppose it could pose as great help, and a very valuable tool for some people though - but not me personally.
Myspace - you could be right…
Great Post. I think that findind people through MySpace,Facebook and etc might kill some of the people search engines, but you know you can’t search people by ssn using facebook and the emails are in private. Most of the profiles are private.
Here you can learn about search engines and people search by ssn
Take care,
Benny