Nov 16 2007
Spock not ready for prime time
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.
- 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.
- 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.
