A while ago I stumbled upon an article on TechCrunch about Spock, the people search engine.
I was very interested in the idea and went to sign up on the site straight away. There I discovered that they had already imported my profile scrapping Linkedin and Facebook. Great software? Really bad for privacy? I’ll leave that up to you, the only thing I know is that at the moment I was pleasantly surprised to be already part of their people index.
After that brief fling-at I decided not to write about it. That was until yesterday, when I received an email from Spock informing me, as a member, that somebody had searched for my name.
Yesterday night I went back to the site, logged in, and was brought to my profile page. The look and feel is still slick and clean, Spock has definitely improved since the last time I logged in, more tools to complete and customize you profile.
I particularly liked the connection/relationship tool – A really spiffy form which lets you select a person from their database and specify how you are related to that person. That’s how you gain “spock-points”, as I understand, works pretty much like Google, the more people you’re “linked” to and the more “important” those people are the more points you gain.
The other tools available to the user to complete their profile include photo uploading, websites (including RSS feed, which is great) and tags.
The site is really well designed and I’m certainly going to use it next time we’ll be looking for programmers in our area.
The only other thing I’d like to see on Spock is some sort of human-readable URLs for you profile to link around, at the moment my profile is accessible here http://www.spock.com/user142936472k210751ss4k168348594k4c1159527, not exactly easy to remember. Give me something like http://www.spock.com/stefanobuliani. Furthermore to put my spock profile link here I had to copy it from the URL bar in my browser.
How about an embed button YouTube style, or a sort of widget?
And now I’m off to Italy for a long overdue week of holiday! I’ll try to take as many photos as possible and publish them here but I can’t promise anything.
Take it easy,
Stefano
