Spock, Worst Start-up Idea Ever?

After the MySpace founders cashed out with more money than the GDP of a small nation, a slew of Web2.0-ish start-ups graced our lives with social network rip offs or vaporware. A more recent challenger is Spock which crosses a social network with a search engine. Boring you say? Well things get more interesting if you hear some background on the service.

Here are some things you should know about Spock a) you don't need to sign up for the service, you may already be there without knowing it, b) the company created a mad libs type application where people could fill in the name of a random person and related nouns, verbs and adjectives, c) the company populated its initial profiles with much of the data received from this application.

You can probably guess where this is going. If I'm filling out a mad libs type form with, say the name of my best friend. I will probably be immature and include a description that is probably completely untrue. For example, if someone were to say "John Cramer" is a cross dressing trapeze artist from Prague in the application. A user searching for "John Cramer" on Spock may well find those terms associated with his profile. The company also has a spider that roams the internet and looks for text associated with the various names.

As Wired recently said, if Spock becomes popular - you may have no choice but to sign on so you can police your reputation.

I can't attest to the accuracy of the results. I searched for my name and those of a few friends and (luckily) didn't have a profile.

If you feel the need to try out Spock, you can find a review here. It was the first few matche I found via Google and happens to say some relatively positive things about the site. I think I share the observations of Web Strategist when it wrote that it seems like Spock is something that Google could create relatively quickly and dwarf the site in no time.