After seeing a mention of people search engine Spock on Jim Stroud's blog back in November I signed up for access. Finally, yesterday they sent me my login details.
I have to admit that six months on I couldn't even remember why I'd signed up. There is an "about" page but no "help" pages. However, the about page informed me that "Spock is the online leader in personal search, helping users find and discover people. With over one hundred million people already indexed and millions added every day, Spock is building the broadest and deepest people specific search engine."
So I had a quick play. As they say it's a people search engine. You enter someone's name (or some keywords) and all matching results are returned. Some have photos and all are ""tagged" with keywords. By clicking on a tag you can see who else matches those keywords. The idea is that users will rank and add to the tags. Like Wikedpedia the idea is that human input on top of the computer generated results will create a powerful database.
It seems to me like a different take on ZoomInfo - minus the help files (although don't get me wrong I don't think ZoomInfo's perfect). Until Spock manages to contain all the power (and contacts) of LinkedIn I'm not convinced.
However, to be fair so far I've only spent 40 minutes or so on the site. If you want a more indepth analysis there are two interesting reviews here and here (the second one is Tim O'Reilly and he seems to love it). Maybe I'm too recruitment focussed and not web 2.0 enough but it feels like the reinvention of a wheel or two.
I too am signed up for Spock beta, and am not entirely impressed. Pictures can be uploaded, but not deleted, no help files, and Barbara Bush is tagged as "Wife" and has Wikipedia info rather than a personal description that she wrote herself. It seems to be a sophisticated game of "seven degrees from Kevin Bacon" to me!
Posted by: Christi | 17 May 2007 at 08:44 PM