Spock is Searching for Intelligent Life

Spock has been a much anticipated startup with a vision for a much deeper people search capability. This private beta was announced at the Web 2.0 Expo back in April and the stated mission has been to organize information around people and to create a search result for everyone on the planet. What Spock is trying to develop is the most accurate and relevant search application focused on people.

The company was founded in 2006 by Jay Bhatti and Jaideep Singh. Spock is a Silicon Valley operation that is funded by Clearstone Venture Partners and Opus Capital. According to the literature online and on site Spock is literally adding and indexing millions of people every day through discovery and community contribution.

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch spoke well of Spock in an article some weeks ago: "Spock did a great job of finding information about different kinds of people, but part of where Spock really shines is what they do after the search is completed. They are slowly indexing the entire web, focusing on important hubs of people information like blogs, Wikipedia, photo sites and, of course, social networks."

Searching for Other Intelligent Life

Spock essentially searches people by name or search term and renders a series of relevant results. A good example of a "term" based search would be the results from "drunk driver", which renders a header of several notable people fitting the category. There is also a three column categorization listing those in your favorites on Spock, those in the news and the top search results overall.

Other Spock functions include; tagging, voting, adding websites, related people, and adding pictures, favorites, identities and your contacts. Users can add searchable tags, photos and other information about the people they find and also vote on tags submitted by other members. The very best feature at Spock so far is the exclusive and often detailed profile page of the person being sought after. In fact Spock individually tags and creates one of these pages for every person indexed. Obviously, the more information there is on a person, the more detailed the page is.

Apples and Oranges?

Tim O'Reilly seemed enamored with the idea of Spock in the same way Arrington was in his review. Tim is perhaps the only person I know who can illiterate an idea like "Disambiguating people" to describe putting tags and information into a data base. As a test I searched one of Tim's examples Eric E.Schmidt Google's CEO on both Spock and Wikipedia. As it turns out the Spock's data comes primarily from Wikipedia, but the latter produces the customary in depth coverage of the subject. The Spock version is as accessible to a prospective user the main difference being the associations available at Spock and the obviously limited data compared to an in depth profile. Unless searching your Aunt Maybell renders as in depth a page immediately or you create it for her, it may take some time to get her up there with the billionaires.

Wikipedia Result

Spock Result

The potential of the startup (I will not call it innovation yet) rests in the hands of the user base as is the case with so many Web 2.0 services. After all we have witnessed early this year, and particularly after testing 100 or more startups, it is a little difficult to be more than a just impressed. Without sounding too jaded, it is amazing to me that both these Web 2.0 celebrities used copious amounts of blog space and an over abundance of screen shots to describe a fairly simple technology and vision. This Spock is not nearly as impressive as Mr. Spock's tricorder in the 60's just yet.

Conclusion

Spock may well be one of the big hits of 2007 as others predict, but it has a ways to go. It is a very Web 2.0 application of at least a venue specific niche market entry, even if the technology and methodology are not exactly awe inspiring. I am trying not to be unfair as this startup is an infant in respect to development stage and the all important user contributions. My sense of the thing is that technology may be passing Spock by.

My recent "test pilot" duties have taken me over sites that can aggregate, organize, search, notify and perform a host of other duties in the most innovative ways.

Perhaps they have spoiled me in their flexibility and potential. Second Brain in particular, with a crawler like Spock would allow users to not only find even obscure people like Spock might, but to then tag, organize and build mental maps in a way Spock cannot right now. I think we are edging towards Web 3.0 with some of our innovation, but Spock will have to incorporate a great deal in the coming months to live up to the juice provided by Arrington and O'Reilly.

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