Simon Butcher

Several people have urged me over the past month to look at the a new web service known as Spock. I avoided doing so, partly because I'm sceptical of anything named after Star Trek characters, their little blue man logo reminded me of every horrible Web 2.0 site, but mainly because it sounded like yet another social networking site — another way for “trendy” people to justify their pathetic friendships publicly. These sites seem to be taking over the minds of once rational people as SMS speak once did, like an incurable sexually transmitted fungus that is making everyone itch but nobody is willing to openly talk about how bad the problem is.

Spock however, isn't exactly a social networking site. It looks like one, and acts like one, but it's main goal is to be a search engine for people. To this end, Spock sucks the lives out of existing sites such as LinkedIn, MySpace, FaceBook and other such CamelCased “network” sites, and carefully plucks out information to build personal profiles with complex metadata rather than just a flat index as Google would.

The world just got a little bit smaller… again.