I started receiving three of “invitations” from spock.com on behalf of former coworkers:
“Hi Jim Carson,
[former coworker] has invited you to join their Trust Network on Spock.
Click here to get started.
Spock is a people search application for finding anyone in the world. Your Trust Network helps Spock tailor search for people you know. By establishing your personal Trust Network, people you trust and people connected to people you trust will appear at the top of search results.”
Each invitation was from someone whom I hadn’t seen in several years. The common denominator is LinkedIn. The spock site isn’t very descriptive:
Based on the invites, I’d surmise one of my coworkers signed up, allowing them to peruse his address book “to see where people [...] are on the web.” Those who weren’t, were “invited,” the “Type 2″ user acquisition technique Stephen Foskett refers to.
Searching for the three people on whose behalf I received invites yielded one match on the bottom of the second page of search results. He had obviously put some thought into organizing his profile, yet his efforts appeared below a sea of marginal data. Strange. There’s no “weighting” of search results for anonymous browsing?
Out of curiosity, I searched for myself. The first match showed a spectacular melange of Jim Carsons: a logo for Lion District Governor, a photo I took from a 2003 road trip, faculty picture of the Associate Professor of English at Kenyon College, a painting from the [western style] artist and the bio of the Los Angeles DJ. Links include my web site, the Keller City Councilman, the DJ List and the air painter.
The only way I can correct this is to sign up.
Some of the employees have pages that probably represent the best the search can do for an anonymous user. From Maia‘s page, I would infer this is an aggregater of social networking portals. This would address the reading side what SeattleJo’s seemed to be getting at when she referred to “too much stimulation.” There’s still having to subscribe to all of those services to participate.
Hi Jim,
I just wanted to point out that the web links for Jim Carsons you are referring to are actually under ‘Other Results from the Web’that the Spock bot is unsure about. They are not listed under ‘Websites’for a reason. As for pictures — you’re right, we’re still working on this technology, and have a lot of room for improvement.
The great advantage/disadvantage of being the only first name/last name in North America (and probably, the world) is that everything on the web about this first name/last name is about me.
Back in college I discovered the definite disadvantage of having a very common first name/last name combination when I was rejected for my first credit card. My “credit history” was a jumble of identities. This is partly why I’m sensitive to the Spock jumble.