Spock beams into Facebook
Published by Blake Robinson January 9th, 2008 in Facebook Applications, Facebook Review.Spock
Rating: 
Social search engine Spock has found its way into the Facebook App cache. Although the app wasn’t created by the Spock team, it is said to have the creators’ approval.
For those of you unfamiliar with the service, Spock was founded in 2006 as a search engine intended to index the ever increasing number of Online personal data. At the forefront of this information is a trove of of profiles from social networking sites such as MySpace, LinkedIn, Friendster, etc., but Spock also extends itself to Web searches, culling name occurrences from Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia and various other sources. It works effectively enough and can significantly reduce the time it takes for you to stalk locate someone Online.
Its Facebook variant adds no additional functionality, but it does enable you to Spock someone (yes I just used that as a verb, what about it?) directly through Facebook. While the necessity and usefulness of that capability is at best debatable, the app is at least as useful as its standalone counterpart.
Technorati Tags: facebook, linkedin, myspace, spock, wikipedia, social networking, people search, people indexing
That’s true Blake, the idea to build this application and not to wait for Spock Team to do this, was born right inside Facebook. On the pages of Spock Fan Club 2.0 (its Facebook Group I mean), a group that joins Spock supporters, evangelists and just curious about People Search Engine and Web 2.0 ppl.
here is the group btw for those interested:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=19789337936
and there is also (of course!) a topic dedicated to the future evolution of this App, lead by David J. Hinson, developer- enthusiast and Facebook/Spock technical evangelist.
it’s just to comment on “While the necessity and usefulness of that capability is at best debatable”. That app was born as a community idea and developed in free time by David discussed by community. So it could not be too cool immediately, right?
but we believe in the future it will become a real cool plug-in.
Warm Regards,
Andrey Golub- a Spock Evangelist and Blogger
http://www.spock.com/Andrey-Golub
Over time, I believe customers and businesses will benefit greatly by having Brands extended into Social Networks.
The key (I believe) is to “respect the Brand” and embrace and exploit (in the good sense) the Social Graph in which the applications are housed, leveraging the ecosystem to create new ways to interact with the Brand. The Spock FB app certainly does that.
Personally, I take it as a back handed compliment that the initial Spock app is as useful as its standalone counterpart. That’s a good thing
The object of the exercise is not to take traffic from Spock.com and to Facebook, but rather to expose the Spock brand to a broad audience on Facebook, with sufficient utility, and benefit Spock.com by driving traffic there to get the “full experience.”
Otherwise, people would just stick iframes on FB canvas pages and include the full web content of their services and call it a day.
The challenge is to determine balance over what feature sets of existing web services (such as Spock.com, or Geni.com, or even aspects of LinkedIn.com) to expose within Facebook versus what to keep out in order to drive traffic off premise.
Whether users find this Brand approach compelling (or not) remains to be seen.
Thanks again to FaceReviews, Rodney, and Blake for the review and the visibility it affords. Very much appreciated.