Social Media Featured Article

Don't beam Spock Up

Dec 21, 2007 at 06:44 PM by Mr. Howard Greenstein
Since there's not much of a conference market in the late December timeframe, I thought I'd write a quick bit about the latest Social Network service to get it wrong - Spock.com. Spock attempts to beam you up by creating a Borg collective of friends that all seem intent on assimilating you. In the picture

you can see that between 12/9 and 12/17 I got over a dozen requests to add me, or notifications that I had been added to Spock. And many of the people (whose names have been redacted per Starfleet Directive Alpha 65 -- ok I'll stop with the Star Trek jokes now) are really my friends. In fact, when I started getting these notes I was a member! I had signed up early, when it looked like this service might have some value in aggregating people and content around them. However, recently, as Jim Benson notes in his piece "It May be the Evil Spock," Spock misrepresents membership when you log in. It scrapes the web and creates dossiers on people, and when you log in, it says your friend is already a member. What it means is, your friend already has a profile that Spock created without permission. According to a Wired article from August, Spock was calling people pedophiles due to its practice of scraping without any real human intervention. An innocent-looking Facebook App that was "mad-libs like" let people fill out profiles about their friends, and some college-aged wiseguys tagged their buddies with "scandalous" terms. Spock evidently deleted much of these after Wired inquired, but some evidence of this must live on in Google and other internet caches. That'll be fun when HR does a background check before hiring you at the daycare center. Another thing it does wrong, which I call the Quechup effect (after the social network of the same name that spammed everyone this summer), is that it asks for access to your address book to "see if anyone you know is in the network." Brad Templeton points out in "The logical outcome of Spock" that "I have 1,000 or more people in my address book. If the average person engages in “mail everybody in my address book” once a year, I will get on average 3 such mails a day, and so will most others." Brad suggests people request to delete their profiles on Spock to protest the way they're acting. I requested to do so, and await the result. Finally, there's really no way to opt-out. As Spock is just trying to "logically" arrange what is out there about you on the net, so the only way not to show up is to be invisible on the net. Not so easy. At least ZoomInfo, which does a similar scrape and profile creation deal, has an FAQ response as to how to opt-out. So, before you open hailing frequencies or let the Vulcan shuttle dock, think twice about Spock and its practices.
Tagged with: spock, socialnetwork, socialmedia
Comments

Howard,
did you know that later the same WIRED has named Spock.com one of the 'Top 10 Startups Worth Watching in 2008'.
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/startups/news/2007/12/YE_10_startups

That means something? At least that Spock is improving, althought it has got some problem in the past and we've seent the consequences of that.

x “Spock was calling people pedophiles due to its practice of scraping without any real human intervention” <- I also read that article on Wired, that wasn't fine at all.
The basic question is: why there are so many people in the world ready to attack an AGGREGATOR for the information created by somebody else? :)
I have a very different vision on that- Spock is a PEOPLE Search Engine and it's fine, that means its mission is to crowl the Web and aggregate the information around the names he believes belong to some real people. But Spock is also a Community- driven Search Engine, it's a 2.0 project where EVERY NODE (claimed/recognized, to be tracked to prevent an abuse) can contribute to the quality of the Search! Isn't it the basics of the Web 2.0?

I do not really understand those people that when they see a new BETA Web 2.0 (so for COMMUNITY!) service that has something they do not like as its presented, so they instead of trying to CORRECT the incorrect info, thus contributing to the whole World's knowledge, will write articles like ayayayay!
And so how are we going to adopt the Web 2.0 for the everyday's life (or we aren't going anymore?), if people instead of contributing (it's really EASY to correct the incorrect things in the 2.0 environment!), will write negative articles and invite the others to be negative... that's out of my understanding, probably because I have too big passion for the Social Networking and Web 2.0.

Of course the problem of the On-Line Reputation management exist and it's a very big problem of 200x. but if we think it better- it's MUCH easy for one to have the information about his on-line presence concentrated in one place (Single-Point-of-Access, as the Spock spelling, or Naymz, or MySocialURL, etc) so relativelly easy managed and monitored, than to watch the whole Web and fight against it all?

and I won't be commenting the last part of your article about to join Spock to delete the info from there, since you've realized by yourself that it does not have any sense since the info is NOT owned by Spock, it COMES from the Web and then it's MANAGED by the Communuty.
So I think it's more logically to join it and to take care of your On-Line Identification/ Reputation from a comfortable “control centre”.

I did make my choice- after some years of active contributing to the Web and Web 2.0, I did joined Spock and now I have at least one place 'under my control' + anyone who's interested can check there all/most my infos.

Warm Regards.
Andrey Golub- a LinkedIn && Spock Evangelist for Italy
http://www.spock.com/Andrey-Golub

Posted by Andrey Golub at 06:52 AM on Jan 04, 2008

Andrey,
I appreciate that you believe this is a search engine. However, I believe it is a reputation aggregation system that I can't opt out of.
It is not "under my control" if people can vote for items to be in or not in my profile.
A reputation system I can control is my blog, and the articles I write. We can have these conversations in those spaces, and the only comments I'm deleting are spam.

Posted by Mr. Howard Greenstein at 07:11 AM on Jan 08, 2008

Howard,

Just wanted to give you an update on the Spock sign up process and offer some further insight about the site.

The multiple invitations you received were user generated from people using the address book importer. We've done our best to make sure this is as clear as possible. For people upset about receiving notifications, there is an unsubscribe link that people can click on.

As far as opting out of Spock, our help page makes it very clear that the publicly available source of information must be made private, whether it's a myspace page or LinkedIn profile.

With regards to your comment about being in control, because of Spock's unique voting system and because you are notified of any changes, you have control over what is said. Similar to you deleting spam like comments, Spock enables you to correct any erroneous information.

Please feel free to contact me at patrick@corp.spock.com if you have any further questions

Posted by Patrick Cotter at 04:56 PM on Jan 16, 2008
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About Mr. Howard Greenstein

Howard Greenstein, Social Media Strategist and Evangelist and President, The Harbrooke Group. Harbrooke helps firms understand and adopt the technologies and practices that allow them to better communicate with their customers.

Howard'€™s years of experience in the technology world, combined with his background as a coach helps him bridge ...

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