Sriram Krishnan™ Live

A Spock review:

I just checked out Spock and I think it’s pretty cool for many reasons. In my previous entry, I mentioned that I had the beta invite and was gonna review it.

0.5) When you sign up for an account, don’t be freaked out that they have a profile of you with all the relevant information. I did.

1) Firstly, the Spockbot searches the net for people and creates a profile for them in Spock. For instance, the bot looked up my name and created a profile called Sriram Krishnan. There are many Sriram Krishnans in the world but it somehow managed to list the different Sriram Krishnans. A google search would unveil me in the second, if not the third page. But Spock clearly consolidates all the relevant information regarding people within one profile and lists them out, person by person.

2) Secondly, the cool part, it allows people to tag relevant keywords to a person’s profile. For instance, I realised that my profile did not contain nuStart…so I added that keyword to my profile. Users can then vote up/down the keywords according to relevance. So, if you want to look for someone related to Skateboarding and RoR, it will list down people who are associated with both!

3) Extensive. Information here is not restricted to linkedin or wikipedia. If one has any a number of online profiles, the Spockbot consolidates all this information. So you can conduct your background check/research on people with similar interests or so on here. So you don’t have to subscribe to many social networks for instance.

4) Explore relationships. Facebook allows users to define relationships. But most people don’t take this seriously anyways. If it held true, I would have been involved in 20 relationships with around 15 guys over the past 10 years. Linkedin doesn’t allow you to define relationships. Spock does. You can choose how you’re related to someone..and also view how other people are related to your friends/network etc.

5) Unfortunately, Spock is one of the sites where the coolness/importance/usefulness increases with number of users. It’s at an embryonic stage at the moment but as more people populate it, the more content it has..and hence hopefully more useful.

6) An important element in beta tests is feedback. I am pretty impressed with the turnaround rate of the guys behind Spock. I emailed them a couple of bugs/suggestions and they replied almost immediately. Impressive. I felt like a million dollars. All users should feel like that. =)

[Update] 7) As of now, Spock doesn’t have any feature that requires the user to constantly visit their site. Maybe they should add a social element to it such as messaging or commenting.

If you have beta tested Spock and have additional comments or (dis) agree with whatever I mentioned above, please feel free to comment.

For more information on how to use Spock, visit their blog.