Spock - Not the Star Trek one, the search engine one

I am an avid Spock user. Ok.. That’s probably an understatement. I am an extreme Spock user. I am not extreme in my network size, though it has connected me with a large number of people I would have otherwise never found again. Rather, I am an extreme user of the site to do WORK.

Recently, there has been some bashing of Spock going on around the web. When I found out that Tim O’Reilly had put together a post on Spock last spring, I didn’t think anything of it. He liked the site, for many of the same reasons I do.  Earlier this week, it came to my attention that people were using the comment area on that blog post to bash Spock.com. I no longer could stand aside. I posted a comment there about why I use Spock.

Ever since I started using Spock last spring, I have meant to blog about its existence. I just never seem to get to it. There is always something more urgent to write about. No more. Here is my opinion about Spock.com: You should be using it.

Spock has two sides to it. One side lets you keep track of all of the information about you on the web. The other side lets you search the web quickly and easily to find out what the web has to say about others. I use both sides equally, but in different ways. I use the information side to make sure that only true information about me is out on the web. I use the search side to find people who want me to do business with them, connect with them, or follow them.

Where Spock gets its information

Spock’s engines search the web  looking for social networking information about people. It finds web links, news, and other information from everywhere on the internet and organizes it by the people referenced in the information.  The engine pulls all the information together into people based pages.

What Spock knows about you

The Spock engine searches the web to find information about people, true. But in addition, you as a community member of Spock can vote on the tags on yourself and others. The more people that vote on a tag, the higher it will appear in the list of tags. Same goes for photos, quotes, news and links.

One of the unique features of Spock is the “Related People” section. In this area, you mark people as someone you know well enough to consider yourself related to them. For example, as I find Microsoft MVPs that I know on the site, I mark them as “XXX is a fellow MVP and Friend.” Because I have added this item myself, I know that the relationship is real. You can add others to your related list, or you can add yourself to someone else’s related list. Once you have established a relationship, others can vote on the reality of the relationship.

Vote?

Yeah… Vote. Everything on Spock is driven by how many votes an item gets. When you create an item, you are automatically voting “Yes” for it. Others have the option to vote yes or no on all items as well. If you change your mind later about the applicability of the item, you can change your vote to no. No votes move things down in the order of the list, yes votes move them up.

What’s all this about “Trust”?

One of the big discussions about Spock centers around the requests for trust that people send out to the members of their address books and other networks. Requesting trust is done via email. If you request trust from someone, an email is sent in your name to them If they feel like trusting you, they go to their Spock.com page and approve the trust request.

The problems come in when you send a large number of trust requests. Some members of the online world have decided that these trust requests are spam. Me, I don’t’ see it that way. Or, at least not anymore than the requests to play that I get on FaceBook.  (Not that I mind the requests to play… they are good breaks!)

For me, trust allows me to know that the information I am looking at really belongs to the person I think it is. That means that I don’t have to go checking everywhere to find out if the Jorge Jacobs whose information I am looking at is the one who is my son not the one who is the Guatemalan activist.

Want to know more about Spock? Ask me. Or, check out my page at http://www.spock.com/Kathy-Jacobs - One of the few places on the web that I am not callkathy!