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.
Alec Saunders is the Vice President of Developer Relations for BlackBerry make Research in Motion. This is his personal blog, with his personal viewpoints. Prior to this Alec was the CEO and co-founder of Calliflower — the easiest way to hold a meeting, online, on a conference call, or on the go. A double-decade veteran of product management and marketing, he spent nine years at Microsoft where he helped launch Windows 95, the first two versions of Internet Explorer, the Universal Plug and Play initiative, the push into home markets, opt-in email marketing and what might well go down in history as the very first direct email list ever.
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…or owning your own social graph so that you do not have to join another one, ever.
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
I am avoiding Spock. To see some of the reasons, read Beth Kanter's story:
http://beth.typepad.com/beths_blog/2007/12/beware…
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
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.
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