What is Spock?
December 17, 2007 8:06 pm GeneralThe “X has requested your trust” mails started a couple of weeks ago, and so far I’ve collected about a dozen.
I’m not sure what Spock is, or how they’ve been roping people into signing up, but this is the latest in a series of sites where friends are inviting me (presumably in full knowledge) to join Yet Another Social Network where I get to invite all *my* friends to (connect with|friend|link up with|trust) me. Again.
So – wat is Spock? Anyone care to do the sales pitch? What does it bring over LinkedIn, Orkut, Facebook, Plaxo, last.fm, and all the other sites where I’ve been asked to link all my friends and invite them to join to prove that they “trust” me?
December 17th, 2007 at 9:16 pm
It apparently raids your gmail account and spams everyone you know; at least, that is the excuse from the two people who have so spammed me.
December 17th, 2007 at 10:17 pm
I saw some pre-launch hype about Spock being a search engine for people, that would aggregate and index all kinds of things about people (blog, flickr, mailing lists, articles, youtube,…), so when i search for Dave Neary, it would provide neat little capsules of info about each Dave Neary so I could decide which one I was stalking / interested in.
Unfortunately when it went public and I tried it, it turns out it’s just Yet-Another-Social-Netowrking-Roach-Motel, only late to the party so doubly annoying.
December 18th, 2007 at 4:36 am
I got a few invites to Spock too. Like you, I don’t know what’s in it for me to join.
December 18th, 2007 at 5:17 pm
I’d be pretty leery of Spock, it seems to be capitalizing on a lot of the social network conceptual buzz, without actually understanding what social networking is. Basically, they link people together based on trust relationships, and use additional information scraped out of web pages. However, let’s just say their additional information is questionable at best. For example, the author of AmericaBlog was flagged as the top result for “pedophile” merely because he wrote a lot about former congressman Mark Foley, who left the US House of Representatives because he was just that.
Wired news had an article about it a few months ago at:
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/startups/news/2007/08/spock_reputation
Really, the issue with most of these “social networking” systems is that they’re applying many social network analytic algorithms to get “useful” results, without understanding the underlying sociology of the community, or the inherent assumptions of the metrics.
Needless to say, it looks like Spock is something you may want to stay away from until they fix their system and provide a better way to remove tags associated with individuals.