Daily Iteration

Spock is, according to their own blog, a search application for people. When you visit their URL, you are greeted by a simple interface which looks like your standard search engine, but shows a few search suggestions under three categories: In the news, People and Searches. From this standpoint, Spock behaves pretty much like a regular search engine. However, start typing and you will get an AJAXified drop down list of names to search for.

A couple of interesting features: search results are tagged (ah, the golden sound of buzzwords - Spock has them all), and people can add tags or vote for them. Positive votes make tags more relevant, negative votes has the opposite effect. A nice well thought touch is that you can view who voted for a particular tag (see screenshot, click for full image). Supposedly this would disencourage people from thoughtlessly clicking on defamatory tags.

This is all stuff you get to see as an anonymous user. When you log in, you have the option of importing your own contacts from a variety of sources (see screenshot to the left). Here I found Spock to be still a little rough - everything is well presented, but the website failed to load any of my contact on repeated attempts. Since we’re always a little lenient with everything that smells of beta (and these days everything does), let’s move on. This is where Spock’s social features begin to see some action. You have the possibility of adding people as your favorites (anyone, but supposedly you would do this for your contacts). Cool, so now I can have Bill Gates, the Queen of England and my boss all in my favorites list!

Then there is your own profile. You can add up to twenty pictures of yourself (but again, this did not work for me), and also add tags and an about blurb. I guess the idea is that by adding as much information about yourself as possible, it will be easier to find you, or at least help place your profile where you want in terms of keyword affinity.

I might be dumb, but I really fail to see the point in this. If Spock is about getting yourself a nice web presence, it would be much better to use a business-oriented social networking site such as LinkedIn or Xing. If you need to be seen by everyone, how about starting a blog? Either of these seems to me a better option for showing up online. Spock does bring in some nice ideas and adds a new twist to the whole search engine thing, technically it might be great, but for me it needs to offer something more focused, more objective. Then there are the social network possibilities.  I’m not a user of sites such as MySpace or Orkut, so perhaps I’m not the best judge here.  But Spock lacks the feeling of having a home, there isn’t a homepage or some little place to call your own.

I could be wrong about Spock though, and who knows, it might be the next big thing among celebrity-seeking teens or something…