Tim O’Reilly continues his discussion and praise for Spock

The people-finding site/app spock officially launches at Web 2.0 Expo this week.  I’ve put my name in for an account (and am trying to tap into my network for peeps to get bumped up in the queue), since it’s in private beta I haven’t been able to look at it (except for screenshots).  Well if Tim O’Reilly’s review is any indication, I think we should all be pretty excited next week:

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.
Source: O’Reilly Radar > Why I’m so excited about Spock

The idea of pulling together and relating your online activities might be pretty scary to some, but in my world, where my online persona is my resume, I find it exciting.  Except for a chemical and a transportation agency, I’m the #1 Tris on Google (so I’m the #1 human, I guess).

What Spock suggests for us is something that could be akin to an extremely detailed online resume, with perhaps, connections to people in your circle.

Can’t wait to get a look…