Udo's Techblog

So I finally tried out my new Spock.com account (thanks for the invite, Jay) and it's really interesting!

Importing People
Starting my account was really painless. Like many social networking sites, spock.com offers to import friends from other datasources like Plaxo or Gmail. Contrary to many people, I really like that, because it connects you to people that you would probably miss otherwise. In fact, I wish this was a general feature on many sites where I currently have to search for and then add people manually. It would be nice to have an always-up-to-date list of related email adresses that moves around with you on all online services. Maybe that's something Spock or email services like Google Mail could provide as an API function to a broader audience of sites?

Well, like I said, importing people into Spock is painless, except the UI for the list could be just a bit more friendly (maybe checkboxes instead of a "remove" button that asks "are you sure?" every time you delete someone). I was a bit suprised by the actual list of names Spock pulled down from Gmail, though. Some people were missing, while others that I maybe exchanged one email with 3 years ago showed up.

Fleshing out the profile
Out of the box, Spock knew I was a business owner and it also knew that I'm doing something with Software. Not bad! On the other hand, there should be a lot more info out there, considering the sheer number of services that I signed up for at one time or the other. Anyway, for some reason, supplying contact info is something I enjoy so it wasn't a big deal. But I can't help thinking: there has got to be a better way of doing this!

Lots of info on famous people (no kidding)
Finding info on people like, say, Scoble is not a problem. However, you can be sure that if someone doesn't show up on Google, they're not going to be on Spock. Which makes sense, but I'm still irrationally disappointed ;-)

Developers! Developers! Developers!
Spock, which has a really nice and clean interface by the way, loves developers (that's what they actually say on their developers page). And to succeed, they really need to. Right now, they're showing the love by providing access to a RESTful API. Nice! I think I'm gonna play around with this as soon as I have time.

What now?
I'll be spending some more time to dig deeper into Spock, but this is it for now. The preliminary verdict: it's a cool service, you should check it out. Be prepared for increased chatter about Spock in the RSS space!