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O'Reilly Radar > Why I'm so excited about Spock: "

Note: Spock is among the companies launching at the Web 2.0 Expo on Monday.

Michael Arrington wrote the other day about spock, the new people search engine, but I have to say that I don't think he did it justice. Spock is really cool, and performs a unique function that is well outside the range of capabilities of current search engines. What's more, it's got a fabulous interface for harvesting user contribution to improve its results.

You can search for a specific person -- but you can do that on Google. More importantly, you can search for a class of person, say politicians, or people associated with a topic -- say Ruby on Rails. The spock robot automatically creates tags for any person it finds (and it gathers information on people from Wikipedia, social networking sites like LinkedIn and Facebook), but it also lets users add tags of their own, and vote existing tags up or down to strengthen the associations between people and topics. Users can also identify relationships between people (friend, co-worker, etc.), upload pictures, and provide other types of information. This is definitely a site that will get better as more people use it -- one of my key tests for Web 2.0. It also illustrates the heart of a new development paradigm: using programs to populate a database, and people to improve it.

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