Spock – the First People Search Engine.
On the way to the work I heard today on radio a report about the first search engine enabling people search. This unic (at least it was stated so) service is called Spock. About 8 Mio. $ were invested in the development. The search critera can be a name of the person, his age or an e-mail. The search result contains found people with their photos. How does Spock finds the persons? Quite easy, the Spock‘s robots go through the social networks like Xing, Myspace and Facebook and gather the information. I found even my name… some years ago I created an account at LinkedIn just for fun.
From the point of view of privacy Spock is clear. The user profiles on the social networks are accessable for the whole world, so the users gave implicitly their addmition. Apart from this, every person can delete the information about him at Spock website. But still some feeling tells me that the new service will raise a wave of privacy discussions.
What is the actual sence of Spock? Apart from the fun, it should help the firms to find the specialists they need and vice versa.