Very insightful post on the Social Networking business as a whole. I thought I might be able to offer some insight into what Spock.com is doing to create your ideal social directory.

1) Allow me to efficiently segment my profile based on the viewer.

Because Spock is a people search and can link a person to multiple sites, we in effect enable users to maintain a more fun social site and a professional site. Because you can restrict these things via your security settings, it enables a user to connect and direct people.

2) Interoperate with every other social graph tool out there so that I needed to only maintain one identity.

As noted above with Spock.com you have one search result which lets other people know where else you are on the web. The fact that Spock relies on publicly available information it enables us to include people from all across the Web so that you don’t need to search multiple sites to find someone.

3) Automatically update every other address book and social graph so that I wouldn’t need to manage multiple instance of my identity.

With Spock’s Trust Network, it essentially updates people’s network in that your Search Network is controlled by relevance to you giving you the benefit of being able to search specifically within the people you know, and the people your contacts know.

4) Expose my identity and profile information to applications as I permitted and required it to.

With Spock you have voting authority on the tags with which you can be searched for and in terms of contact information, these are fully controlled by the user. The fact that you can have links to your other sites enables a user to have a strictly professional site such as LinkedIn and a strictly social site such as Facebook.

5) Allow me to search other profiles through my relationship network, and rank those results based on the information I need, plus factors like reputation, location and so on

Spock’s Trust Network informs you of how you may be connected to certain people, and allows you to specifically search people via our tagging system. This essentially allows you to search for a Tennis Partner in San Francisco who is connected to you through a coworker.

6) Permit all kinds of communications based on privacy and profile segmentations.

With Spock, messaging can only be done between people who have mutually accepted Trust Requests. You also have a variety of e-mail setting controls

If you have any other questions please feel free to contact me at Patrick@corp.spock.com