The Real Spock Would Surely Disapprove
21 December 2007 – 9:08 amHaving received my 8th or 9th invite in the past few days, I went to check out this apparent-out-of-nowhere social network. There were some pretty notable people (people I think highly of) inviting me in.
I was disappointed to find that they’ve prepopulated their member-base by scraping several other social networks. I had two accounts already in there that they pulled from LinkedIn and MySpace, including my photo from myspace. Perhaps this information was acquired by mind meld. They call them “search results”. Nice try.
Not only did they pre-populate with this ripped-off data, but they do a nice job in making it seem like these people all signed up for the service. Then, when you request a “trust” relationship, I presume that they send that person an invite. I won’t test it to confirm.
They got balls to use the word “trust”.
I’ll be deleting my accounts.
How to delete anything, by the way, is very non-obvious. From reading the help section, the way to delete things is with liberal use of the “flag” option. I suggest you use it as well.
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11 Responses to “The Real Spock Would Surely Disapprove”
I like to think he’d fire a photon torpedo at them specially equiiped to erase their stolen data, chap their butts and disable their keywboards.
Thanks for exposing these punks.
By Pat Grady on Dec 21, 2007
You know, with the tremendous popularity of social networks, you would think the last thing a budding social network would do is tick off influential voices in the blogging community. Obviously, there are millions of people clamoring for the latest new social pad, so why do anything that could reinforce a negative impression by doing things like what has happened to you?
By Local SEO Specialist - Terry Reeves on Dec 21, 2007
I think there are more and more websites to come that will start using these techniques to get themselves up in ranking fast.. I myself do not believe in Google ranking but real rank rulezz.
By Aaron on Dec 23, 2007
Your post seemed quite logical to me.
Get it? Spock? Logical?
oy.
Actually, Scotty (ooh, another Star Trek reference - better stay away from the donuts - you saw what happened to him as he got older) it serves you right for having a My Space page to begin with! j/k of course.
Happy holidays to you and yours!
By Stevie the K on Dec 24, 2007
I suppose it does serve me right, Stevie.
Happy Holidays to you as well.
By Scott on Dec 24, 2007
Wow…I can’t believe people are actually still doing this in this day and age. That is shameful. Really shameful. And to think that if they’re inviting people, why pre-populate?
By Jack on Dec 30, 2007
hi there,
It’s always nice to be the first to not say “WoW!” to the author. Could I?
Scott, your position in respect of People Search Engines looks very strange to me, taking into account your experience with Web as it comes from your profile and another Blogs and so on.
Try to think of Spock as first of all an people aggregator, that pulls from the Web the info and facts that are already there. Spock itself (Spock Robots) does not create any content- try to check any record there for how many (how few :lol:) tags are added by the Robot, and then compare it with those tags added/ voted by community!
OK first of all, Spock is just a People Search Engine. As another traditional Search Engine but to look for people.
its goal is to firstly generate person’s Online Identity, from all that could be found on the Web about this name+surname. This could have been done by Google, and I think this HAD to be done by Google in the era of 2.0. but the real Google 2.0 has become Spock. Oops!
So it’s the Search Engine that uses the same Google first of all, then it searches for Social Networking profiles of people ‘coz it’s clear this is the most easy way to recognize a PERSON behind a set of Web Pages. right?
Imagine you are a web crowler and you find “Mister X” somewhere on a Web Page (as Google does)- is it easy to understand if it’s a PERSON or just “mister” + “X”, the two words? not a trivial thing…
With help of social networks it’s much easy- if the crowler finds a PUBLIC profile of somebody “Mister X” on LinkedIn or MySpace- it’s clear that that Mr.X is a person. + the Web of today is Web 2.0, not Web 1.0 anymore- so why it’s wrong to check the Web 2.0 for a Search Engine 2.0?! it’s just the next generation of Web so also the Search Engines evolve…
but (!) the social profile of a person on LinkedIn is public, it was shared by the profile owner. so the crowler has just found it. Then Spock Robots have some cool intelligence to “generate” person from there, and to check all other pages where Mr.X is mentioned, to probably add some of them to the “Digital Identity” of Mr.X. (pictures, tags, web references, related people, who knows what else cold be important for the People Search Engine users?).
well, of course it’s only my guess of how the process could work, I am not Spock CTO :), but I think anybody who has a minimum of logic and wants to think how People Search Engine (not Spock but in general) could work- would come to a similar conclusion.
then, Spock is a Search Engine 2.0. I think that not less than 80% of all tags and content on Spock are added NOT by Spock Robots, but by ppl- Spock Users.
btw, there could be also not logged people to contribute, but Spock has decided to not make chaos from Personal Pages, to track every vote/ new item in the system. Otherwise- it could be an Open Who’s Who. It’s still open, it’s just needed to register to have a login and a personal page/ identity.
I think Spock is like WIKI for people, do you refute also wikis, Scott? I think this acticle could help you thinking about Spock from another prospective:
“Spock: The People Search Wiki”
http://blogs.mediapost.com/search_insider/?p=695
so it’s the community that does the job. It could be one of your friend who knows that you work for Company Y, to say it to me, to him, to Spock, write about it in a Blog or on the wall, or to put this as your tag on Spock.
(on the Fun Wall of a Facebook user it’s a different thing :lol:)
This is called SOCIAL TAGGING, right?
and finally, if we take into account “Where is it all going to”, about Social Networking and Web 2.0 after OpenSocial, DataPortability and OpenID- so it’s all becomes the real OPEN SOCIAL WEB, + the Web 2.0 services will pass the data from one to another. The most bloggers think of it positively.
and Spock is just a PEOPLE Search Engine 2.0 with the mission to generate PEOPLE from tons of Web Pages and Social Networking profiles (only those public) + then with help of community to clean/tune these profiles, to arrive to a Who’s Who on the Web. What’s wrong here in the approach?
of course it’s not only Spock but there are lots of another people-search engines. but those are or smaller projects, or less ambitious than Spock :), or not 2.0 at all so won’t survive.
I do not think it’s a good idea to try to cancel from the Web/Web 2.0 aggregator like Spock + global world community project, the personal/ professional info about us. It will be found anyway, today or tomorrow. by Spock or by Smokk :), or the same Google tomorrow will do that and never ask us the opinion- you know what has become our small good Open Source advocate of yesterday Google!
I think some 10 years later people were afraid of normal Search Engine in the same way, no? they said- WoW, somebody will get it ALL about me in ONE CLICK! so the Search Engines make it just easy to access the information, but the information is ALREADY there! it’s created by us, not by Google or Spock. isn’t it true?
well, everyone has to choose personally if to try to avoid all searching/ indexing/ aggregating/ categorizing/ and so on Web and Web 2.0 services, or to instead use these tools for an effective own Online Identity Management. This is how do I see the problem, but you may have another opinions of course
Kind Regards,
Andrey Golub- a Spock Evangelist and Blogger
http://www.spock.com/Andrey-Golub
By Andrey Golub on Jan 10, 2008
It’s getting almost scary to me how much people can find out about you now. I know that myspace is public and so are many other sites that people would build a profile on, but when a site like this comes along to ‘aggregate’ people’s profiles and activities, I do get somewhat nervous that perhaps a little more than you might like will be all in one place at one time.
Perhaps I’m just getting old and the days of privacy are dying.
By Mark on Jan 14, 2008
Scott,
Sorry for chiming in a little late but I figured I might clarify a few things that you might be confused about with Spock. With regards to your multiple search results, Spock enables users to merge multiple search results which are likely to occur given the numerous sites most people are on. While we’re usually good about combining multiple search results, we’ve tried to make it as easy and flawless as possible.
Trust requests enable people to share contact information with each other and send messages. The importance of this feature is that it gives users an easier way to connect, and that it’s controlled via trust requests meaning without a trust request you can not share contact information. Given how difficult it can be to obtain contact information with people you know on LinkedIn or Myspace, we think of this feature as enhancing the site.
As far as deletion, our flagging process is used so that rather than e-mailing users can easily flag a search result.
If you have any other questions please feel free to contact me at patrick@corp.spock.ocm
By Patrick on Jan 16, 2008
Thanks for the comment, Patrick.
Confused? I don’t think so. I see what I see. I could be convinced that maybe I’ve misunderstood your methods and intentions.
My perceptions aside, the fact remains that I received emails from you notifying me that people befriended me (I don’t remember what you call it) when I hadn’t signed up for your service. I’m pretty sure that not all those people had my email address handy,or even that they really wanted me to receive a message if I hadn’t been signed up already. Maybe one of those people gave you my email address. Maybe you scraped it from somewhere. I don’t know. Either way, a little too aggressive, in my opinion.
Further your “evangelist” Andrey has gone and tagged my account with many bits of personal information about me, which he’s gone through the trouble of digging up. Granted, none of it is secret, and I’ve provided it to various places like Facebook and Linked In. But still, it’s sort of creepy.
If you want to have a “search engine” of people, I guess there’s nothing wrong with that. But this search engine not only grabbed info about me, but it came knocking. All in all I feel like I’ve been inducted into a social network that I had no intention of joining, or even any knowledge of for that matter.
It sounds like your intentions are good. If so, I hope you recover from the rough start that you got with people like me.
Good luck.
By Scott on Jan 16, 2008
I’ve seen people do this on dating sites all the time, but not on a Myspace-type site. At least those sites have the courtesy to completely make someone up, rather than use real people.
By The Star Trek Jail Break on Jan 25, 2008