« Top Ten Astronomy Pix | Main | Austin Green Art! » December 18, 2007Vulcan mind-meld gone bad?Whole herds of my online contacts were sending me "trust requests" via the new people-focused search engine, Spock, and I finally took a few minutes to investigate. I found several articles that were generally positive, suggesting that a vertical search engine that aggregates data about people (not entirely new - think Zoominfo) might be worth checking out. I joined and invited a few of my friends. Two or three asked me about the site, and I responded that it seemed okay to me, though it did seem to be dumping a lot of email (trust requests) into my inbox. I saw a post about it on an email list and, having missed some of the context, asked the poster to say more about his issues. He didn't, but others responded, including my colleague Bill Anderson, who mentioned a Wired article about the site. I had also seen Nancy's post about the site, and followed up with her. She told me she was getting emails from the site reporting activity associated with her data there, even though she had never registered. She gave me the link to a Wired News article about Spock that I'd seen but hadn't followed, assuming it was just the Wired News blog post about the site that turned up in a Google search, that I had already read. However the longer Wired News story suggests the Spock team might not be thinking through some of their decisions. For instance, Spock created a Facebook app similar to Mad Libs. Via this app, many people "stories about themselves and their friends, filling the blanks with scandalous terms," not realizing that the stories would be indexed and stored as part of Spock's aggregate data. ... they were horrified to discover that Spock used the terms they supplied to build public profiles on them and other Facebook members. (After being contacted by Wired News, Spock erased the tags from many of these profiles, but some were still visible at press time.) Spock evidently has kinks in interpretive aspects of its algorithms: blogger John Aravosis of Americablog was tagged "pedophile" because he had used the term in writing about Congressman Mark Foley. I still think Spock has an interesting approach that could be valuable, their stumbling launch has burned a lot of social capital. It might be hard to recover. (Even if you're avoiding the site, check out Leonard Nimoy's page... it's only right.) jon posted this at 10:49 PM |
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