November 15, 2007

Fascinating

Please allow me to introduce you to Spock. No, not the Vulcan Science Officer. Spock is a search engine, but instead of searching for webpages, it searches for people. You can search by name, keyword, location, profession, whatever.

Let's say you wanted to find people that use MacBooks, (like me). Well, then just search for MacBook User and you're off. Notice the number one hit is the Jobs himself. (Although I'm pretty sure he uses a MacBook Pro, probably one with a touchscreen.) But it doesn't just turn up celebrities or "people of note" like Wikipedia. Anyone can input their own information.

This isn't a social networking site like Facebook or MySpace, although there are some similarities. One big difference is that you are not in total control of your own entry. Other people can "tag" you, and then anyone and everyone gets to vote if that actually applies to you or not. So, I could upload a picture of myself, tag myself as "hottest man on the planet" and everyone would get to vote it that applies or not. (Which, of course, it does - you can gaze upon my hotness in the video below.)

So it is a weird and wonderful combination of digg, myspace, Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, Yahoo, WhitePages, del.icio.us, Wikipedia, Google Maps, those pay-for-search people finder sites, and it's own unique thing. It's pretty innovative. Oh, and did I mention that its free? Free is good. We like free. Free beats non-free anyday.

You could find anyone from the President of the United States of America, to illegal immigrants. Or from rock stars to rock collectors. And anyone in between. It is a great service for looking up people.

The possibilities are really endless. You could use it as a dating service - find 25 year old girls who play World of Warcraft, watch anime, like to do yoga, and cook. You could use it as a business networking client. Find business owners who don't know much about computers and would love to let you work from home. Since it's "just a" search engine, (meaning it doesn't tell you what to do with it), it's really up to you how and why you use it.

So if you are looking for blind opera singers, short basketball players, or middle aged realtors, you can find them all on Spock.




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