SPOCK, People Search Engine [2.0]: what is happening?
Spock is a great People Search Engine, but it's not a Social Network?
Spock, People Search Engine
SPOCK is a Leading People Search Engine, everyone knows this. http://www.spock.com
You may also want to check Alexa's index for Spock.com and its close competitors.
The History of Spock
the history of Spock is that once in the beginning of its social life it wasa Social Network... with a very, very intensive Social Life on it! I personally found several good "friends 2.0" on Spock and, btw, I was the first Spock Champion :lol:
Then one day Spock Board (or shareholders ?) decided to change the project strategy: to (temporary?) suspend "people powered" option for content generation, and bet on the automatic web/ web 2.0 crowling & AI- based algorithms processing (leaving the initial "people powered" data in their DB).
I followed Spock since its first days and I've seen all these "people powered" PROBLEMS created for Spock by its Community, along with the content very important for it. so from one hand Community was very useful, Community was the key to spread the Spock spirit on the Web/ Web 2.0 and to "filter" the tags generated by spock robots. On the other hand, the (very intensive) Social Life of Spock Community has generated so many "useless" (junk) content so this created big troubles for the primary use of Spock project- PEOPLE SEARCH.
this is the story. Now SPOCK, on my opinion, is the BEST PEOPLE SEARCH ENGINE on the Web. but it's not a Social Network anymore. Is this good or bad for Spock? who knows! we'll see it all soon :)
What is happening?
Spock has a Supporters Club on Facebook, created and maintained by Spock Evangelists. And there on the Forum, one of the most active in the past community supporters Pierre Bastoul has asked this simple question- what is happening ?
Hi all, First leaderboard desapeard from Spock. Someone tell me it was only for a time, but 1 month later leaderboard is not back !
So I do not play the game anymore... I used to go on Spock everyday, now I'm away from it :( I went back today. Just to see how my trusted friends are going, and contact some to ask news...
aih aih aih : - where are contact informations : emails, phone numbers ? - how can I request trust for new people ? - voting ? flag ? tagging ? - why all that real estate adds around my profile ? and this one "Date Muslim woman now!", do you think it's related to me ? - what is the use of http://www.spock.com/realestate, is Spock just adirectory of real estate agents now ?
Apart from all that questions, are you still using Spock ? -Pierre
Which is a very correct question to ask!
I've seen this topic still time ago, but I wasn't ready to speak "on behalf of Spock" neither from myself, being officially SPOCK Community Leader for Italy. With time passed, I've seen many other Social/ 2.0 projects and the clear understanding of "what's going on with Spock" has come to my mind :).
It's all my PERSONAL opinions, it isn't related to my role @ Spock Team and of course nobody asked me to express my opinion in any way. So it's a honest opinion for my friends and readers. And I believe some other people may also want to hear it.
Spock is a great People Search Engine, but it's not a Social Network?
Yes! this is what is happening, Pierre! :)
"SPOCK is about people"- it's 100 true, but SPOCK is not "powered by community"!
Below is my complete response on Facebook Forum dedicated to Spock-
I believe you already know the answers, Pierre! :)
SPOCK of today isn't a Community powered Search Engine any more, but it's PEOPLE SEARCH ENGINE, I believe the best one on the Web. The "news" is that Spock it is not "powered by people"!,- it's FOR people and it's ABOUT people, but powered by Spock Robots, Web Crowlers, Spock official staff etc.
the rest is OK- the Spock's engineering team has a cool "know how" about People Search on the Web, they are experts for how to crowl the web/ web 2.0, how to aggregate this info and to finally generate/ feed people's profiles in spock database. this all is very useful for the Web World and I know for sure very many people use spock as Search Engine for people's names (also Alexa.com knows it).
it's just that spock of today is NOT a Social Network as it was in the beginning. but is this such a problem? You should remember how many troubles (junk tags, social spammers, etc) did they have with the community- powered search, so at this moment this feature is "on hold". let's see the future developments!
Andrey, the Alexa graph is very pretty, but it isn't meaningful: http://www.antezeta.com/web-analytics/web-statistics.html
Posted by Sean Carlos on Sunday, October 26th, 2008 at 13:05
Ciao Sean, thank you as always for a new link to antezeta.com from my Blog:lol:, but do you have any opinion about the main subject of this article? :)
Posted by Andrey Golub on Sunday, October 26th, 2008 at 13:24
thanks for your answers Andrey, I'm sharing your opinion. I hope we would have the Spock's staff views someday.
-Pierre
Posted by Pierre Bastou ( Anonymous )/82.245.64.32 on Sunday, October 26th, 2008 at 15:36
Andrey,
Thanks for your write up here, both here and on the Facebook Forum. As always, you've put much thought from an objective standpoint into your response, and it is appreciated.
I agree with much of what you've determined. I have also met many good Web 2.0 friends on Spock, and it was really the first professional social site I participated in, and sparked my interest for more. Thankfully, though the social aspect of Spock is either gone or on hold, most of the people I came to know and love on Spock are connected with me elsewhere on the net, so all is not lost.
Change is difficult for users, and there is no way to make every user happy. Spock was experiencing too much junk tagging and in my opinion it was cheapening the quality of many of the profiles. Something had to be done, I understand that and really support that. My biggest complaint would be the lack of communication that the staff at Spock has had with (especially) the Power Users Forum, in the direction they will be taking with the project, so we can all make decisions individually about the level of involvement and visibility we wish to have. For now, I am choosing to keep my profile there, in tact, and once I see the direction it is going, will probably still keep it, but will decide which things (especially some of the tags that others may have added on my profile) I will request to be removed. If Spock chooses to keep it as strictly a People Search, it will serve that purpose well.
That being said, I do miss the social aspect of it. Glad I can still connect with you and my other Web 2.0 friends in other venues =)
Blessings~
Robyn
Posted by Robyn Flach ( Anonymous )/24.131.131.247 on Sunday, October 26th, 2008 at 16:41
Hi Spock's friends :)
It's so strange to talk with you in here now about Spock,
i remember when we begun to play with it,
it was really funny,
i was spending a lot of time in there,
tagging and adding friends (i remember when i invited you Robyn ;D you were so shy on the beginning and one of the most active in the last period :D),
or i remember the competition we had in there for the leaderboard (you were so happy the day you scored your first Million points Andrey :D),
but unfortunately somebody decided that it was not a game anymore(i'm sorry if i use this word,because it was not exactely only a game,but you know how i am :D) ,
so it was nice to be there,
but the game is over,
it gave us the chanche to be a nice group (do you remember what's happened with the spammer? 2.0 community's power ;D ahahahah)
I totally agree with Robyn,
and i can't stop to thanks Spock,
because without it i couldn't have the chance to meet you all:
my Spock's friends :)
Carlo :)
Posted by Carlo Branca on Monday, October 27th, 2008 at 00:09
Andrey, as I suspect you know, I'm really serious about the misuse of web statistics, e.g. Alexa, comScore, Nielsen etc. If I'm going to drop a link for SEO purposes, I do it where it is at least clickable :-). Here I'm dropping links to back up the point(s) I'm making.
Sorry I haven't elaborated on my comment until now, I had another project I had to finish... and, Gott sei Dank, it launched today....
I admit a certain perplexity regarding Spock. From the beginning, I wasn't sure how it might be useful. In particular, in its initial incarnation, Spock seemed to have a lot of low quality content.
While Wikipedia has fairly successfully demonstrated a self-policing user generated content model, Spock seemed to be lacking either a sufficient community base or the right software mechanisms needed to facilitate quality profile creation and maintenance.
The current approach seems to be toward an automated aggregation of people information, similar to Zoominfo [1]. While I find the presence of Spock, Naymz et al potentially useful from a reputation management stand point, if I'm looking for information on a person, I'm more inclined to start with web 0.27 resources like LinkedIn, professional associations, and why not, Facebook.
This may be my limitation, while you're definitely an early adopter, I'm more often a late early adopter - I wait for the first brave souls to demonstrate the validity or not of a tool before I jump in. Recently I made an exception to this rule - I played with Plurk while Twitter was showing us her whale [2]; I'm not sure it was time well spent.
What I do know is that I DO what to keep an eye on what you're working on 'cause I know you're on the bleeding edge and some of what you're evangelizing will prove VERY useful.
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