I came across Spock a few weeks ago and signed up for an invite.  At that stage it was just an empty web page with the promise of more to come, still the thought someone was tackling the problem of identifying people on the internet was refreshing.

Well Spock has moved to private beta now, and at first glance this is going to be the next killer app for finding and identifying people.  What makes it different from Google? Well a couple of things actually.

When I search for “Tim Bull” in Google, I get a hit for every web page that I (or someone with my name) happens to score a mention.  This is a long way from Spock, which acts in a person centric way — at a high level (and I’m interpreting here) a person is more akin to an object. Not a page, but rather a collection of references which relate to the person.

Where Spock is makles this process more intelligent is that you (and others) can interact with your person profile, voting on references, assigning references and generally collaborating to make a diverse, and complete version of “you”.

It’s another great example of how the new Internet is all about attention.  While some applications (Particls is one example) are looking at “WHAT” you should pay attention too, Spock looks at “WHO” you should pay attention to.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 26th, 2007 at 8:36 am and is filed under Spock, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.