Spock: The Logic of People Search in a Web 2.0 World - Settings and Claiming a Profile

You may remember from last time that I mentioned several links that are in the upper right  hand corner of every page on Spock: your name (Terri Wells in my case), Favorites, History, Settings, and Logout. If you see a profile you want to always get to easily, you can add it to your Favorites by clicking on the star next to their name. Then when you click on your Favorites, Spock will display all of them in much the same way it would show listings from its own results. Judging from the screen shot I took of Spock's home page, it will also show them on your home page after you've started choosing Favorites. (That may change, though; a quick check of Spock's home page with me logged in showed popular searches where my list of Favorites -- all one of them -- used to be).  

The History link shows you every profile you've looked at, at least in the last few days. I've only been playing with Spock that long (and actively for less time of course), so that's all I can say for certain. Again, you get the same amount of information you would get if these came up in the search results, and of course you can click back to the profiles. It also tells you how recently you looked at the profile; the list is displayed from most recent to least recent, and at the bottom of each entry it tells you when you last viewed the profile.

The Settings link is interesting. It lets you change your password, of course. You can also adjust your email accounts and settings. This is useful because Spock assumes every email address belongs to a different person, so if others invite you to join Spock with a different address, you'll end up with multiple Spock profiles - which kind of defeats Spock's whole purpose of having one profile per person, and having it be as complete as they can make it. Spock includes this warning to those who think they can add bogus email accounts: "If you add an email that does not belong to you, the owner of that email address can request your Spock password and take control of your Spock account." It's nice to know Spock is on top of this.

The Settings link lets you handle two other things: adult tag preferences and finding friends in your address book. The former is a radio button that lets you decide whether or not to let people tag you with adult tags, and by default it is set to not permit this. The latter is easier to explain with an image:

Basically, you can import your web address book from just about any service. What if you don't have a web address book? As you can barely make out at the bottom (my fault, not theirs), you can also import your Outlook and Outlook Express address book, if you're connecting with Microsoft IE 5.5 or higher. As it happened, I was using FireFox, so that wasn't going to work for me (I have IE on my system, so if I really wanted to import the address book it wouldn't have been a big deal). At any rate, it looks like Spock is shooting to be a one-stop shop as far as a network to help people find each other. I know I had great fun finding some people I knew but never expected to find in Spock, just from playing around with tags!

Not surprisingly, when I did a search for Terri Wells, eight of them came up. One of them was me. You can indeed claim a profile. Below the box in the profile that holds the picture and some vital information is a link that says "Claim: this is me!" When I clicked that link, this is what came up:

Well...I did try it. The first two times it didn't work. The following day, when I tried it again, it did work - though Spock had some issues at first and I had to check back later. I'm not kidding; after I clicked the link on the screen after it finished processing, it said "Not Good. Looks like Spock's having some issues (poor Spock). Please check back in a bit." To Spock's credit, everything was under control in less than 10 minutes. I hope Spock gets better about this though; it's the kind of problem you can understand a company having at the private beta stage, but it will have to be fixed before Spock goes past this stage. It's worth noting, by the way, that Spock has a feedback link; I hope they keep that after Spock gets opened to the world.

As the owner of my profile, I can set and change everything that appears in the box that shows my picture and vital statistics; I can also edit the blurb about myself that appears below that picture. I can add public information about myself (email address, IM name, and phone number) and I can choose to make this information publicly visible or visible just to my favorites. I can't add private information about myself, just about other people - which makes sense when you consider how private information is supposed to be used. I can, of course, do all of the other things that I could do to any other profile (add tags, websites, vote on these items, etc).

As you would expect from any site that collects personal information in one way or another, Spock has a privacy policy. It specifically states that "Spock only collects information and indexes results that are publicly available online. Spock does not crawl, mine, search, or index password protected websites, private websites, or websites that specifically request not to be crawled by search engines....Spock will attempt to not display any personally identifiable information. In cases where this information is available publicly online, Spock will make every attempt to avoid showing this information on the search results."

So in that sense, Spock is even stricter than many other sites out there. I have to wonder, though: you can do all sorts of things to a profile that hasn't been claimed. I didn't play around much with profiles that have been claimed. What happens in that case? Do owners of profiles get notified when someone adds something to their profile? Do they get veto power over what goes into their profile? Can they restrict who has the ability to add things to their profile? It's a tremendous can of worms, and even a certain green-blooded Starfleet officer would have quite a difficult time navigating it.

Obviously, I have a few reservations about Spock. On the other hand, I don't think it's possible to create a people search engine without raising some privacy and control issues. And there are many things that Spock does very well: the logic of one person per profile; the way it harnesses web 2.0 tagging and voting; the way it tries to make it easy for you to import your address books so they're a one-stop shop; and perhaps best of all, the fact that you can make private notes about people that no one but you can see. Also, if it can solve the potential spamming issues, Spock is a search engine that will get better the more it is used, as Tim O'Reilly observed. So when it comes to people search, this search engine may well be on the right track. Here's hoping that Spock will live long and prosper.