Spock, Spokeo, and Networking (Again)

I've talked a lot about Facebook and LinkedIn as networking tools lately. They've both been busy.

Linked in has launched a new beta page, and announced plans for a developer network, ala Facebook and Google's open social. Of course, unlike Facebook, LinkedIn is used exclusively for business networking, so they are only including approved aps, and it's safe to say there will be no werewolvesor zombies on the LinkedIn app. network.

Facebook has stumbled a few time recently. First were the well document miscues with the Beacon program, and now they have been aggressively shutting down people's accounts.

And while all of this has been taking place, I've gotten invited to 2 new networks this week.

The person who invited me to Spokeo, described it as "like spying on your friends- it's lots of fun, but you feel a little dirty afterwards." Spokeo combines a bloglines-like feed reader, with a twitter "following" policy, as opposed a confirmed friends policy like Facebook. Throw in some search tools that will collect email addresses from gmail, hotmail, Yahoo, twitter, LinkedIn, and many more, and present an aggregated feed of any social networking traffic performed by accounts registered to those addresses, similar to Plaxo Pulse, but without the permissions.

Within seconds I knew who had purchased something a little naughty at Amazon, found anonymous blogs for friends who probably preferred to remain anonymous, and started listening to a music collection an ex-girlfriend had dedicated to me on Pandora. You'll be happy to know that it was sappy love-song material, not angry chick-rock.

Spokeo has 2 places to improve.

The first is just an ease of use idea that I noticed fairly quickly after signing up. I happen to know that johndo@yahoo.com and john.do@bigcompany.com are the same person, thought there is no way for spokeo to know that. The system should have some easy to use sorting tools to facilitate that, but it doesn't, so I have to go through a list of a few hundred names for every profile I want to condense.

The second problem is that you have to go to Spokeo to see the feed. Either spokeo is going to have to give me a complete, rich feed reader ala Bloglines, and get me to switch because I can have their content in one place, or they need to make a custom RSS feed for my friends, and allow me to download it into the feed reader of my choice- unlikely because I can't see any revenue model except for ads, and that depends on page views, and RSS doesn't increase page views. Just my $0.02.

*Note: After I wrote this I made the same suggestion to Spokeo support. I got prompt and detailed answers as to their intention ti implement, and the reasons for the delay. I was VERY impressed with that.

Spock seems like a mix of Zoominfo, Wikipedia, and LinkedIn.

The site does a great job gathering meta-data. In fact, by the time I logged on to answer my initial invitation, The site had correctly identified my current company and title, assigned me 16 accurate tags, and created a google news feed about me that accurately pared articles about me out from the other 2 Noah Roths who have results on the first page of that Google search.

From there it allows you to customize your own profile, and also allows wiki style updating of other profiles. Add mutually approved friend connections, and a value ranking system, and you have the making of a pretty compelling business networking offering.

Which brings me back to a point I've discussed before. I really like Spock, but it's going to take a lot more than that for me to ask my entire network to sign up to another social network, customize another profile, and re-invite all of their friends.

If Spock were an Open ID project, I'd be networking there like crazy.

*Note: Since writing this, I've decided on my spock strategy- for now... I'll be accepting invitations from real connections who invite me, but I'm just not ready to invite my entire network to a new platform yet. I'm going to have to believe that it reaches the survival tipping point before I do that.