Lately, Spock "trust" invites have been making the rounds of the social mediasphere. In the past couple of days alone, I've gotten them from roughly a dozen people -- many of whom I barely know. Spock, as far as I can tell, is a search engine meant to help people find other people based on public data available on the web (mostly culled from social network profiles, it seems.)
But having seen what my Spock profile looks like, what Spock presents for other people I know (or have known during my life), and pondering what it means to establish a "trust" relationship with someone I hardly know (or even with some of the people I do know) has me scratching my head. Maybe I'm being paranoid or maybe I'm missing something, but I'm not really sure what Spock means or, even, what it's actually for.
Is it cool? Think about it -- a search engine that presents an aggregated view of information about a person, pulled together and presented in a single profile. That could be pretty useful in a lot of ways, not least of which being monitoring and managing your own personal online footprint and reputation. If the information is comprehensive and accurate, that is (more on that in a bit.)
Is it creepy? I live a pretty visible social media existence and am fully aware that everything I post to this blog, Twitter, Facebook or any of the many other platforms I've tried is available, searchable and will be on the web long after I'm gone. But do I really want everything to be so readily accessible in one place? I've Googled myself lots of times, but not once did the top results present my age, birth date, zodiac sign, marital status, sexual preference, the fact that I have a child -- all of which are captured in my Spock profile. I'm sure it's all out there and that if I took the time to cull through the tens-of-thousands of Google hits for my name, I'd find most of it -- but that requires far more effort than most normal people would expend. Or you could friend me on Facebook or MySpace, where I've posted many of these factoids - but then again, that would presume that I accept your invite (which would most likely mean that I at least know who you are.)
Some quick searches also turned up old friends and former co-workers who don't live particularly public lives, almost certainly have no idea that their personal info is being aggregated and might not be thrilled to have people 'find' them. I'm pretty clued into social media and new technologies, yet even I had no idea what Spock was until I received my first trust invite.
Is it even useful? As I write this, Spock shows seven different profiles for me and each of them contains slightly different information (seemingly based on where the data came from - one seems skewed toward my LinkedIn profile, another to my essentially-dormant MySpace profile, etc.) What's more, a scan of the tags that the Spock spiders have associated with my profiles are unreliable at best -- according to Spock I am married (true), with a kid (true), straight (true) and a scorpio (true), AND single (false), born on October 24, 1969 (false) and direct (not even sure what that means.) And as much as I am tempted to correct the innacuracies, I worry that I would be feeding a beast that just might bite my hand.
Drill into just one of the tags associated with me - Wunderman (a company where I worked) - and you'll get a jumble of former co-workers and people who happen to have Wunderman as a last name. One of those people is the founder of that agency but most have probably never heard of it. For a 'people search engine' that doesn't seem useful at all...
I'm not the only one confused by all of this. Blogger, new media entrepreneur and Media Kitchen digital guru Darren Herman is stumped. So are lots of people on Twitter, which is interesting since the Twitterati that I know tend to be among the most clued-in social media mavens.
Maybe some of you know more about Spock than I do and can help me figure it out. What do you think?
