Trust me… on Spock.
People have been pinging me to become part of their Spock network for weeks now. Spock is a people search engine which gobbles up information about people on the web. It combines Google-like search characteristics, a social network built around trusted contacts, and a social tagging scheme - think de.licio.us tags applied to people rather than web content.
I have been playing with it a little recently, and haven't yet figured out all you can do with it. It certainly seems like a terrific tool for a recruiter or anyone else who might be combing a personal network looking for specific skills or knowledge. LinkedIn has some of these characteristics now, but now all. However, I wonder if they're simply too late to the party. As one very close friend wrote me last night when I invited him:
Unless every other way we have to communicate has broken, I am not joining another Social Network. Sorry. All these do is generate more and more email.
Hmmm… perhaps it's time to think about the consolidation of social graphs.
December 17th, 2007 at 10:48 am
…or owning your own social graph so that you do not have to join another one, ever.
December 17th, 2007 at 2:37 pm
Alec,
I tend to agree that getting involved with yet another social networking service is a no-go given I’ve already got “investments” in Facebook and LinkedIn. Still, I will likely accept Spock invitations because you never know what could happen, but I won’t be paying much, if any, attention to it.
Mark
December 18th, 2007 at 4:22 am
I am avoiding Spock. To see some of the reasons, read Beth Kanter’s story:
http://beth.typepad.com/beths_blog/2007/12/beware-of-spock.html
December 29th, 2007 at 5:52 pm
[...] [source: Trust me… on Spock.] [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 7:01 pm
[...] Body of client Truphone pinged me yesterday on Skype about a reading something on pal and client Alec Saunders’ personal blog about getting an email about Spock, a network I am deeming as Anti-Social and did so the first time [...]
January 17th, 2008 at 7:03 pm
I use Spock for a number of different things. One of the most frequent things I use it for is to find out who someone is. For example, I learned from your Spock page that you are tagged with “Microsoft” - makes me curious to find out if we have connections in common :)
As for the proliferation of social networks…. Yeah there are a lot of them out there. What makes Spock different for me is that it provides one place to learn about the many places one is on the Web. I like that I can go to a person’s Spock page and see the agregate of all of thier other on-line activities. It saves me time. And, it gives me a jumping off point to learn more if I need to.
Just my two cents.
Kathy Jacobs, Spock Evangelist
February 11th, 2008 at 12:21 pm
I love spock.
It’s happening already. Spock is becoming a VERB.
spock is a verb. It refers to the people search engine, http://spock.com
Usage: Spock me! - telling someone to look you up on spock.com
You’ve been spocked! - an imperative for someone to look up their spock profile because something has changed, usually positively, like a new picture, a new tag added, a new link, a new relationship.
Kenneth Udut can be spocked at http://www.spock.com/Kenneth-Udut-zeeIb1Ou - to be spocked at means - this is the URL of that person’s profile.