Spock

For some reason the site makes me want ice-cream. Rationally though, this all sounds a little like Google Base to me, except that Spock is niche, and automated.

Despite still being in beta, Spock's doors have been open publicly for just over a month now, and the service is gaining attention. Spock allows you to take over your personal profile that may already exist, but also in the spirit of IMDb and more recently Wikipedia, you can modify the data of other people.

This has been done in an interesting way: Essentially, you vote on a profile's primary data, such as their name, to help ensure accuracy within the database. You can add “tags” to their profile in order to help categorise it, and these tags also follow the voting procedure. Equally, relations to other people follow the same principle, with each relationship being qualified with another type of tag that can be voted for. People can increase or decrease the relevance of each item through their votes, such that a high number of “yes” (“it is relevant”) votes increases the visibility of an item, and when enough “no” votes cancel out the number of “yes” votes the piece of information disappears.

For example, I have voted for George W. Bush's name as being correct, and the tag “idiot” being correct. This starts to highlight a problem, though. Looking at Bush's tags, you can start to see how easily the system can be vandalised, diminishing the integrity of the profile. While items with the most “yes” votes claim higher visibility, there's nothing stopping several people from adding the “idiot” tag to my profile and it lingering there as I cannot vote it down enough to disappear.

The ease at which people can add damaging information to profiles isn't my only concern, as it's just as easy for people to add information to profiles that is true but not necessarily intended to be public knowledge. Private personal details can be easily exposed and difficult to remove from the site. Spock's privacy policy may breach privacy laws in some countries, as even if they remove your profile upon request, it may be rebuilt the next time they crawl some other site. They are trying to adhere to the robots.txt rules, but it seems like once you're listed on Spock, that's it.

Spock tries to reward people for adding data and voting “appropriately” by awarding people with “Spock Power” — a sort of authority ranking system that highlights people who have influenced the system the most, but this is little more than an ego-stroking device that again could be easily abused.

Since Spock have been crawling social networking sites, as well as other databases such as Wikipedia, they claim to have already indexed over 100 million people. Sounding somewhat like Google, they plan to “eventually index everyone in the world.” That's an awful lot of profiles that will be un-maintained, bogus, and no doubt duplicated, a problem I'm not sure they will be able to solve. Search Spock now for Mickey Mouse, Kermit the Frog, or Gandalf the Grey, and you'll see what I mean.

Even my own profile is unfortunately duplicated. Spock found me on LinkedIn, and subsequently created a profile for me without my involvement. I had to create a profile to be able to claim the existing profile, and supposedly the two profiles will eventually be merged, but this has not yet happened. This fragmented experience may discourage people from bothering to update their details on the service.

Ego searching for my own profile on Spock and comparing it with a search on Google at least provides some insight into how the service should work.

While I appreciate the concept of the service, something is leaving me a little worried. Anyone looking at the title of this website would know that I'm not hiding my identity at all, but there are some parts of my life which must remain private. Likewise, it irritates me greatly to see a service that makes slander as easy as a few clicks, and has claims no responsibility.

Maybe Spock will just turn out to be yet another social networking site, except this one's pre-populated. It's life, Jim, but not as we know it.