Spock organizes Humanity

The application Spock mines the Internet for information on people and allows users to claim and customize their profile. It has become the dominant people search application on the Internet. The coming years it might become the de facto standard for finding and specifying information on individuals within the (web) applications marketplace.

Within the IT Enterprise landscape we can differentiate markets and within each market, e.g. software applications we can define areas, e.g. CRM, ERP, Supply chain management and business intelligence. Within each of these areas we have a clear view on the leaders of these segments and the followers, e.g. by using Gartner’s reports (or any of the dozens of other IT Research and Consultancy companies).

“The Internet” however is still too young and pretty much too alive to pinpoint the exact markets. It is as if each day new applications arise which somehow define a complete new area which noone noticed before but which actually fulfils a need for people or companies. When we give it a try we find “search”, “market places” and a lot more. Many of the leading web sites are transforming to provide a multitude of services and applications for users which somehow makes them comparable to an application that provides more features with each new release.

Applications that manage to become the leader in their segments should not be underestimated. When they maintain their position they will become essential building blocks for the coming decade. Furthermore these web applications could take over the leadership in accompanying markets or provide additional essential functionality in traditional markets.

When we look at the “traditional” applications who deal with “humans” we find among others (we can extend this list to dozens of areas):

• CRM applications, which focus on customers and business contacts (e.g. Siebel, Salesforce, KANA)
• Directory software, which focuses on internally ordening humans and other resources (e.g. Active Directory, OpenLDAP)
• Identity Management Software, which focuses on the identity life-cycle of persons and objects (e.g. IBM Tivoli Identitiy Manager, Oracle Identity Manager)

All of these applications focus on the needs for companies and organizations. The Internet however is a wide open space where “humanity” resides and which different needs and brought applications for humans from a different more open angle. During the past years different groups of web applications arose who tackle parts of these needs.

• Social Networking Applications, which allow to define relations and store profile information (LinkedIn, more)
• Open Addressbooks, which allows online address books with more functionality (Plaxo)
• Genealogy Applications, which allows to maintain family trees (and profiles) (Geni, WebBiographies)

Especially during this era of web2.0 social web software the list of common web applications is near endless. One of the most interesting arising new areas is the one of people search in the wide open Internet domain.

On the Internet we can find information on humans, both alive and dead, both famous and not famous. Challenges here are:

• How can we find information on specific humans
• How can we group humans on topics
• How can we validate that information found is relevant for the human searched for
• How can we find relations between humans

Spock.com is a collaborative web application, founded on advanced academic algorithms, which is currently becoming the leader in this market. There is a reason why this is happening:

• It has indexed over 100 million people representing over 1.5 billion data records, which is massive but most of all provides -wow- results
• The market is available: 30% of all Internet searches are people related
• The records include data from all leading social networks, which is the big thing social users are waiting for
• It has raised $7 million of funding, which provides stability and potential for growth
• It has the support and PR from the leaders in “the” community: O’Reilly, Arrington, and many more
• It allows anyone to add information to persons (annotations), which makes it a wikipedia for persons so the data gets enriched and validated automatically by the community but it also allows new functionality for groups e.g. using tags for group identifications
• It allows smart persons or groups to enter their own people search algorithms (The Spock Challenge) so it will keep light years in front of any competition
• It allows users to claim their profile to validate their own information and add new information, which is a need for a large group of very active social Internet users (comparable to Ziki) and it allows users to use their profile as their main hub (we only have to wait for merging this with OpenId and consorts.

For illustration purposes we will give some examples of the current ways you can use Spock.com to help you (I had to refrain myself to stop at these examples):

	Investigate companies or organizations e.g. IBM.In the example you can see that the the CEO, Sam Palmisano, is the first in the list. Which may sound obvious, but remember that it is not easy to find this ordered human list anywhere else (although it could be discussed if Thomas Watson should be #1). When you follow the list you get an amazing alternate human view on the company. Clicking through on persons or tags gives more and more insight on persons and human relations e.g. which politicians do they support. It can be seen as Google who started by providing simple “most clicked” rankings on the dmoz directory and slowly providing more functionality around it. tip: where do you rank in your company? tip: also try countries, etc…
	Find human information on topics e.g. badmintonSurprisingly we don’t find the world champions at the top but… the chief architect of Spock (2nd we find Zhang Ning). The interesting thing here is that I can immediately add interesting webpages on Zhang Ning myself and so help the community with adding useful information on these persons. It also allows the community to influence the order of appearance of persons in this list. tip: try your own favorite sport or hobby.
	Find out who is behind an e-mail address.Uhm… I know this guy from somewhere. But seriously: in time you could well imagine this becoming a global directory system or even being coupled with internal directory and identity systems. In terms of imaginable integrations with both classic IT systems and other web applications the possibilities are endless. tip: try your known e-mail addresses
	Use advanced search algorithms to find a specific group of people. In this example: blond hair, between 18 and 25, with photograph, female and location worldwide As any tags can be added the amount of options to search for is endless e.g. female badminton players who like Greek food and have one arm. Groups, organizations and companies could add tag strategies to escape the strict hierarchical system of a normal directory based internal address book. It allows you to search for all developers in your company who specialize in C#.NET and like to drink red wine for example. And yes, private tags are coming and the API to interface with Spock is already available. tip: try the advanced search to search for people with your interests in a certain age group.
	Investigate Persons e.g. Ivanka Trump.You can find out relations (hey, look who she is married to), read up on the bio or the latest news or click through on tags or related people. Just like concepts as startpagina allow to have 1 webmaster collect information on 1 topic, I can imagine certain dedicated persons will take ownership of persons. E.g. just collect all information on certain politicians, reporters or movie stars and add the latest images and news on this person. It will become the main hub around certain persons and “specialists” who keep dossiers on persons. tip: try finding politicians, movie stars, sport stars, business icons, inventors, famous historic persons, musicians and even add your tags and information you know about them.
	Claim your own profile.It allows you to take control over the information people will find when they look for your name. It also provides a convenient way to list all your social network profiles, relations and tags that are relevant for you in one place. Spock offers both Flash and Javascript widgets to place on your website / sidebar so you can use it as a one-stop solution for an “about you” page linked from your web site:

Apart from these examples it is already possible to use the API to query Spock for persons and integrate this in your (web) applications. E.g you could write a WordPress plugin which automatically lists the most important persons on a certain tag, integrate person’s information and news and so on (so your blog content will continuously stay up-to-date) or for corporate use to integrate it with existing person applications as mentioned above (CRM, directory services, who-is-who, etc…). Magazines and newspapers could integrate it with dossiers on persons.

As a conclusion: Spock has opened up it’s service to the public for about 3 months now but has already gained a leadership in a market that may well have to defined much broader than just “people search”. Both end-users as well as organizations and companies can benefit greatly from it already at this stage. The collaborative aspect and the wide range of possible applicable use cases including usage of the API makes it a playground of opportunities for third parties.

As a personal side-note: there were so many possible interesting ideas/items on my list to add to this blog article that it will be welcome topic for the coming years that I will give it a tag of it’s own.