SOMEWHAT FRANK

Pentagon Hacked, iPhone Announcements, Facebook People Search, 10 Web Trends, Delicious Preview, MyStrands Music Video & Netscape Digg Clone Gone

Photo of the Week: I took this photo of Red Sox on the gates of Fenway Park while visiting Boston this weekend for TECH cocktail Boston.

Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 09.09.2007

Facebook Source Code Leak, Porn 2.0, Spock Launches, Personalize Jib Jab, Change of myAOL Heart & Startup Tips

Photo of the Week: A couple of Maine Lobstahs! from a surf & turf event I attended on Friday. It doesn't get a whole lot more "summer" than this.

Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 08.12.2007

Gleamd People Bio Postings With Ratings

Gleamd, a product created by pixelspread and design student Matthew McInerney, recently launched into private beta to offer a place to highlight, search and rate people. According to the site:

"Gleamd is a place to highlight interesting people doing interesting things on the Internet."

A quick glimpse of Gleamed might remind you of a blog as its layout offers up posts of people's biographies. Each post can be added by any member of the community and then goes through a moderation process prior to public posting. Some have called it combination of Spock, Mahalo and Digg. Check out the Gleamd screen-shot below.

I think Gleamd has some potential as finding people on the Web is a valuable proposition but it may be missing  a couple of things. First, I feel like Gleamd seems to be missing the ability to update a biography or I could have just missed the feature. UPDATE: I determined that added items or people can be edited by the submitter. Also you cannot add yourself to the product. Secondly, I did not find Gleamd to be doing anything to help build up the number of people added to the product which is important since the people search should get better as more people are added. Gleamd is also against users adding their own biography entry to the site which could limit the number of people added to the site. Either way, Gleamd will be interesting to watch as it is currently only in private beta and has a little time before it's time to shine.

For more information check out the Gleamd blog which pointed me to this interview of Gleamd founder Matthew McInerney.

Is Spock Spamming My Contacts?

Spock, a people search engine, that I previously highlighted has been making some slightly questionable moves to grow its user base. Though I am a fan of Spock, I have been informed by a number of my friends and contacts that they were contacted by Spock on my behalf. An example email is below:

Hi Jane Doe,

Frank has invited you to Spock.

Create your account by clicking here

Thanks! Jay and the Spock Team

This was news to me! While the email above looks great, I never sent anyone an email introducing Spock, nor do I recall endorsing the behavior. I assume Spoke offered some way to opt in/out of this type of push technique but I must have missed it. It reminds me of the way that Plaxo used to send emails to all your contacts about birthdays and other updates.

While Spock's auto-email behavior is not spam since it was probably something that could be turned off, I am not happy it has been reaching out to my contacts. I wish Spock would have made it more clear that it would be emailing my contacts.

Spock Focuses Search On People

Searching for people online is pretty common however some people have no digital presence. Spock, a Menlo Park-based startup, aims to make it easier to find people online. Spock debuted its new people focused search engine at the Web 2.o Expo (April 2007). 

Spock blends automated and community profile building functionality to develop a large people search index. Spock uses a combination for contextual and tag search to offer up people search results on more than just a person's name. I signed up for a private beta account and added my profile which I have included as an embeddable widget below.

According to a report on VentureBeat, Spoke housed over 100 million profiles at its launch and has been expanding everyday as it leverages sites like LinkedIn and MySpace to pull in profiles via your contacts. While I think Spock is a good idea that offers a great interface for finding people it may have some trouble changing people's searching habits away from Google, Wikipedia or Facebook.