Spock - The New People Search Engine
In my opinion, one of the hightlights of the Web 2.0 Expo 2007 was the Spock presentation at the first session of Launch Pad. Launch Pad is the venue where organizers choose approximately a dozen companies wishing to have their first public unveiling, of either the company or a significant new product, on the mainstage at Web 2.0 Expo. Among the presentations conducted in that Launch Pad session, Spock was selected by the audience as the most interesting.
Now, what is Spock? Spock is the new people search engine. Once logged in, you can search for a certain person and if this particular individual is already in the Spock database, you can tag him/her as you wish and even upload a photo which you think relates to her/him. The leveraged Web 2.0 concept is “wisdom of the crowds”. So, ideally, once there are enough voters and votes for a person on the same tag or photo, his/her most popular and true attributes will prevail over the others. And if the person you are looking for is not there, you can send an invitation and then start tagging.
When I first logged in, I found my name and all the tags were by the ”Spock Robot”. Spock team seems to have used the LinkedIn database for the ordinary folks like me. If you find your name in Spock and if the information source is LinkedIn, you can claim that is you by simply clicking on the “claim: This is me” link and entering your LinkedIn email and password. At that point, the system will merge your two profiles into one. This merging process sometimes takes forever. Good thing is you won’t need to keep your browser window open for it to be completed. Just start it and come back in couple of days, you might find yourself lucky.
While there are some hickups with it, I like the Spock concept. I would be happy to see these folks at Spock succeed. Spock is still in private beta. That means to be able to use it, you will need an invitation. I initially got an invitation through a close friend and since than I have been tinkering with it. Apparently, these guys at Spock might have noticed that I have been very active so they gave me more invitations to share. So, I have plenty of invitations to share for anyone who is interested. Just post a comment and I will be sending you one shortly. I would like to hear about your experience with Spock as well.
Written by Kaan Bora on July 9th, 2007 with
1 comment.
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#1. October 2nd, 2007, at 4:53 AM.
Hocam gondersene hala varsa Spock invitation’i. Kanadaya gelince arayacagiz soz
Mart ta eşimle Seattle a gelecem yahu, Toronto yakın değil mi oraya?