Sign Up for Spock Invites

Talk about transparency! A new web 2.0 startup called Spock plans to create a people-search engine. If you think you were hiding on the internet, think again. The service plans to launch a people-search service that collects data about people and aggregates it in an easy-to-search platform. From their website: "Spock’s mission is to organize information around people and create a search result of everyone in the world. ‘30% of all internet searches are people related. We have created the most relevant, accurate, and largest search application focused on people’ said Jaideep Singh, CEO of SPOCK. ‘To date we have indexed over 100 million people representing over 1.5 billion data records. We plan to eventually index everyone in the world.’" Everyone in the world!

Once launched, users will be able to "claim" their names, similar to how homeowners can "claim" their houses on Zillow. To prove you are you, you must prove that you can access one of your personal data sources, like a MySpace or LinkedIn page. Once that’s done, you can have authority over your name, like choosing which picture displays, what data is visible on your profile, and who can see it. Spock users can also tag people and vote on which tags are accurate. Another Spock feature will allow you to import your personal contact list, whether from Outlook or from a social network site, and then perform searches against that list. The rich feature set may lead to Spock turning into a social network itself, but that is currently not their goal. Spock is now in private beta, but you can sign up for an invite here.

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