Will Spock.com, a social listings service, be worth using?
[Title updated 8/3/2007]
I read about Spock.com on O’Reilly Radar a few months ago, and couldn’t help but be intrigued. Mr. O’Reilly wrote:
‘Michael Arrington wrote the other day about spock, the new people search engine, but I have to say that I don’t think he did it justice. Spock is really cool, and performs a unique function that is well outside the range of capabilities of current search engines. What’s more, it’s got a fabulous interface for harvesting user contribution to improve its results.
You can search for a specific person — but you can do that on Google. More importantly, you can search for a class of person, say politicians, or people associated with a topic — say Ruby on Rails. The spock robot automatically creates tags for any person it finds (and it gathers information on people from Wikipedia, social networking sites like LinkedIn and Facebook), but it also lets users add tags of their own, and vote existing tags up or down to strengthen the associations between people and topics. Users can also identify relationships between people (friend, co-worker, etc.), upload pictures, and provide other types of information. This is definitely a site that will get better as more people use it — one of my key tests for Web 2.0. It also illustrates the heart of a new development paradigm: using programs to populate a database, and people to improve it.’
The service is a closed beta, but I finally found a way to check it out–I left my request for it at InviteShare and moments later, I was invited. [Check that service out if you are wondering what new web2.0 stuff is coming down the pike or want to join Spock or Pownce. In fact, InviteShare itself could actually develop into a pretty cool social networking site--at least until everyone in line gets their invite to the red-hot BitTorrent closed beta sites like SuperTorrents, Demonoid.com and Torrentleech.org.]
So I got my invite and went and looked at the Spock.com site, searched a few tags and a few people, and one thing that struck me is how dependent Spock seems on Myspace profiles–useful enough for lots of people but hardly a reliable main source. Also, some sites are based on LinkedIn profiles and entries about famous people rely heavily on Wikipedia.
I think at the end of the day, if nearly everyone joins and tends to their profile (although I don’t know how much control a user has over their own profile because when I was clicking the link to finish the “claim this profile” process it repeatedly gave an error message) it will basically become a social networking aggregator, a hot field at the moment but different than what the site seems intended for.
Why will it not work as a people listing? Basically, because I don’t know how it won’t become a major spam magnet once it opens up to public users. Besides that, it has all the potential to have all the problems that Wikipedia has with user credibility, self-promotion, grudges and personal attacks.
I went in and added my web site, so now people who look at my entry can find that page alongside my less-recently-updated Myspace page. That’s pretty cool. And since you can tag people, I guess I could have tagged myself “MBA” and “Midwesterner” or stuff like that–maybe I will. But then, what’s to stop someone from going to my profile and tagging me “capitalist pig” and “hillbilly” as well? Nothing, it seems. I guess maybe I can vote those down or something–but for now that’s not enough to convince me it will work, or that in the current social networking blizzard I’d really want to spend much time using this particular site.
It’s all kind of unclear how the site will look with heavy traffic, so my observations are quite preliminary. But does Spock match the hype so far? I don’t think so.
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3 Comments
hey dan -
one thing you might not have known about Spock is that in order to leave tags / vote, you need to have an account / be logged in… thus, no “anonymous tag spamming”… everything is on the record, and all votes have an owner.
similarly, over time certain individuals on Spock will begin to build up more credibility / authority, and their votes will carry more legitimacy… sort of like how folks achieve high reputation scores on eBay, or greater authority on Wikipedia, or Digg, or SlashDot.
while it’s certainly possible — even likely — that many open systems will have spam of some sort (search spam, blog spam, email spam, tag spam, etc), there are ways to limit the power of bad actors and to encourage and enable the power of good actors. the community overall can help limit this behavior, and the system itself can also assist the community.
Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia, eBay, Hotmail, Blogger, and many other successful web properties have these same issues — and they appear to be able to solve these issues and protect their users from spam (some better than others).
Spock is a new service, however given their engineers come from some of the same environments above (several ex-Yahoo folks), there’s no reason to think they can’t figure out similar ways to combat & deter spam.
- dave mcclure
(ps – full disclosure: i’m an advisor to Spock, and i tag-bomb Mike Arrington all the time
Thanks for sharing your view, Dave.
I’d like to see a Spock come up with a good way to handle spam and offer quality listings for everyone, and maybe it will turn to be effective like that eventually with those user credibility ratings and other measures–as I said, my observations are very preliminary.
[...] already tried to pour cold water all over Wikia, and I remain a skeptic on Spock. To the point: the machine powered search algorithms used by companies like Google and Technorati [...]