I sincerely hate to criticize some services especially since I wouldn’t probably do better, but in the case of Spock.com, I just can’t help myself. In any case thank you very much to GuiM.fr for having invited me.
Spock is the new trendy people search engine, supposed to crawl the Internet looking for information on you. It is also exactly as I would describe Ziki.com, which is a service I really like which aggregates your public information on one page and even allows you to top Google results by buying keywords for you. It is exactly what I love in the Internet: being able to MANAGE all the information you make public without sometimes even realizing all the impacts on what you display online. But even if the basic definition of those two websites is the same, Spock presents MAJOR disadvantages compared to Ziki.
Indeed it allows other people to interact with your profile, which means that your Spock profile, likely to have a good Google ranking, may contain wrong or defamatory information. Of course it is a very “2.0″ service, as the community contributes to give an image of you, but I really don’t think that it is desirable to let other people play with such an important thing as your virtual identity. All the virtual identity services such as Ziki are trying to improve your “Net rep”, whereas Spock just don’t understand the main point here and proposes a service which doesn’t meet current expectations from my point of view.
Even worse, but less importantly, their crawler is apparently not as good as the Ziki one, and their design is just a nightmare (really bad for a personnal page): personnaly I really wouldn’t want an employer to see my Spock profile. On the contrary, it is a pleasure to show you my Ziki profile. And just for info, Ziki offers 100 business cards with the cool Ziki logo here; a great way to combine online and offline representation.
And if you (despite all) want to try Spock, do not hesitate to ask me for invites in the comments.
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Thanks for this post!
I also got to know Ziki through its design and its user friendly interface initially.
Since the launch of the V2, all this features have even been refined and Ziki’s going a straight way to become a main stream people search engine.
One of Ziki’s most attractive features is probably its free search engine registration within Google, Yahoo!, MSN and its content networks. Did you try it ?
And a great news for french users: Ziki announced a partnership with ooprint yesterday. You can get 100 personalized Ziki visiting cards for free. Get more info on Ziki’s french blog…
You are right Rupert, I think that the V2 is a real improvement, it just needs to go a little quicker. Concerning the referencing on search engines, it is definitely a great feature, especially since my blog does not top Google results, and I would prefer somebody to find my blog rather than some stupid comments I made years ago. So I also have to add that Ziki is definitely a great source of traffic, even if it is before all a destination in itself.
As you can see I mentioned the info about the business cards at the end of the article, I hope that people will use this offer as the designs are really good.
And what is your opinion about Spock Rupert? Is it a threat to Ziki, especially since they have a lot of financing?
A lot of financing is always a threat… if it used well.
Spock’s creating a great buzz since its beta launch some weeks ago.
Their concept is a little bit different from Ziki’s one as it does not integrate own sources of social networking which they can construct on. Ziki’s move from a social network and content aggregator to a people search engine function offers an internal base (even if it is still small) which make Ziki’s result more pertinent.
This is also the reason, why we might await other - more important - moves on this market. Facebook or LinkedIn launching their own people search engines might hardly impact the current positionings.
You are so right about the importance of an underlying social network first.
But concerning Facebook, they are too much seen as a social network to become a great people search engine, and the main problem is that the level of customization of your profile depending on your different types of friends is limited, which means that their logic is not to help users manage information but just push them to display as much info as possible on their profile, as it is a lot better for advertisers. The interesting approach that Ziki has is the management of online identity, something Facebook is really bad at (even if it is amazing in other aspects of course!)
So good luck Ziki!
Facebook doesn’t need to launch its people search engine on the current Facebook website. They can come up with a new page and benefit from their present database.
I think that social networks and people search are two consecutive evolutions but they are closely linked and can be combined on only one space (have a look on my last post on this subject).
Your article perfectly describe the link between the three “models”. Concerning Facebook however, I am not sure that it would be their best move, as there is still a doubt on their capacity of becoming mainstream and the problems it would cause to users. We’ve had a great discussion about that earlier on this blog, here.