red leaf life

Last week, I found myself in a dinner with a former engineer with Yahoo! With whom I had worked on Yahoo! Local Canada, particularly on the component ratings and reviews “, the system of recommendations by users. I was happy to see him again. He then learned that it is now an engineer at Spock. While I complained intrusive on the side of all those sites for managing the reputation of the online identity, here in his own words what he told me: Because of sites like us, in a few years Search Engines will not exist anymore! Watch me! “.

Spock- the best for people search gets around this problem by creating a critical mass of usefulness without needing anybody to sign up. By combing other social networking sites and the internet at large, spock.com has created millions of profiles of people who aren’t even aware the site exists. And since their userbase is potential employers and stalkers as much as the people being profiled–they bill themselves as a “people search engine”–it’s already useful to at least the first segment of their users, the people who are searching. The question is how the site deals with the second group, the people who are profiled. That’s where it gets troubling.

What’s powerful about this site is that it figures out that info from multiple sources is all about the same person and puts it in one profile. They are far from perfecting this though, so there are a couple less-complete profiles for me, and my main profile has a link to information about when I was picked by the Detroit Red Wings in the 1983 NHL draft. Even if you don’t know me, you can figure out that that isn’t the same Craig Butz. But did you know I have a Ph.D. in education and have been the director of a charter school in Las Vegas?