Tom Lindmeier’s Blog @ MarketPlanB

Spock, the new people search engine achieved a PR coup yesterday with a story on PBS News Hour. Here is their definition of the concept.

Spock is a people search application. You can search for celebrities you love, politicians you hate, athletes on your favorite sports team, your neighbors and friends, or even people you have fallen out of touch with. For each person we find on the internet we provide links to where they are on the web. At Spock, we make finding information about people easy. Spock combines two very powerful forces. First, our technology organizes web content about people into easily understood search results. We search for information on bio pages, social networks, news sites, blogs, directories …pretty much every place imaginable on the internet. Second, the Spock community contributes information to help enhance the search experience. Members can add tags, pictures, and web links or simply vote on existing information to increase its relevance. Anyone can join to help make search better for everyone.

The business model for may become a killer application because it solves a problem with a unique solution. I am a member of a number of social networks and am sometimes frustrated by the fragmentation of my social network. The ability to aggregate people information is of value to me. So I enthusiastically searched Spock for my name and started a sign-up process.

Spock is still in beta so I expected to find some problems and limitations, but my experience found that it is not usable at this time.

1. The name search revealed only one source of information: Linkedin. There was nothing from bio pages, other social networks, news sites, blogs, and directories as they claim. In contrast a simple Google search will find thousands of references.
2. I started a sign-up process so I could claim my search result. There is a typical email confirmation process. They also provide an opportunity to add data from other social networks at this time and request sign-up names and passwords to build your social profile. The confirmation process failed with an error message that said “duh”. I made another attempt to sign up with the same result.

Right now, Spock is not a better search experience and if my experience is typical, it is not ready for prime time.

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Marketers have understood that it was only a matter of time before Facebook would make its user profiles available for data mining with the express purpose of behavioral targeting. But it also appears that they have will have difficulty with the implications of breaking their implied confidentiality contract with the millions of users.

The mainstream press has picked up on this issue and there is an effort to define the implications. But I believe that most users will not understand the nuances of how data is shared and the protection afforded by data mining in aggregate. Perception is reality and Facebook users are starting to revolt because they feel betrayed.

This post on the Dewayne-Net Technology blog titled The Facebook Bait and Switch sums up the sentiment better than I can:

Facebook is supposed to be an community where you can express who you are, and friends freely communicate. But it’s being transformed into a zone where advertisers with the biggest budgets can harvest your data, take advantage of your network of friends, and deliver targeted marketing and branding commercials. Facebook’s new approach combines behavioral targeting with viral marketing. That system threatens everyone’s privacy. Facebook’s users are viewed as merely grist for a big data mining mill designed to sell targeted ads. This is a real violation of trust. No one is saying Facebook can’t make money. But it needs to be done in a way that respects the privacy and values of its members. The time to express displeasure is now.

I believe that Facebook has broken a covenant with its community by not offering a permission-based solution and will pay a price. It will be very interesting to see how this plays out.

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With the explosion of widgets (mini-apps, gadgets, etc.), the need for a wish list function that allows the incorporation of all ecommerce sites has become obvious. This gaping void is a great business opportunity that will be filled in the near future. The efforts I currently see are not sufficiently seamless or too limited in scale. But developments are moving very quickly towards true universal wish list functionality.

The opening of third party apps for Facebook and the Microsoft partnership has given them a bit of a head start. Google’s recent announcement of OpenSocial and the alliance with MySpace, Bebo, SixApart, Orkut, Salesforce.com, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo and Oracle has a lot of marketers ready to jump in. It appears that OpenSocial is positioned to eventually dominate.

I think e-commerce marketers can wait until this all shakes out. That is, unless you take pleasure in pursuing dead end technologies and starting all over again.

Here are few examples of bleeding edge efforts that are likely to fail because of the changing landscape:

Blue Nile is one of the first to take advantage of Facebook applications and they have done a very nice job of syncing their wish list to your Facebook profile. See the Linda Bustos article at GetElastic for a summary of how it works. But the model for this concept is doomed to failure because you can’t have different Facebook application for each e-commerce business. The clutter would eventually become unmanagable.

My It Things (another social network) has a new widget call Share it! When items are added to a wish list, you can visit your widgets page on your profile, then Embed or Export to any blog or Social Network so your friends and family can see it (supports Blogger, Facebook, Eons, TypePad, Friendster and MySpace). The problem is that you need upload images and input copy to create that wish list.

Wishlist.com is a comparison shopping site that is building its identity as wish list portal. This idea makes sense to me and could be successful if they can build a more seamless method for building the wish lists for items outside of their site. They ask users to bookmark pages from websites to add to the wish list. This method is better but still not seamless enough. You can also automatically add items from within their comparison shopping engine or you can upload images and copy from other websites.

When the technology for building a single profile that can be imported into social networking sites becomes available and a single app can be planted on the product pages and wish lists of any website, the true power of wish lists will be realized. The examples I see now are nothing but noble attempts to work within existing technologies.

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