Insider Chatter by Donna Bogatin

Did you know that “Spock loves Amazon Web services”?

The self-declared number one people search engine declared its love for Amazon Simple Storage Service and Amazon’s Elastic Cloud july 31 at its blog:

“Though we don’t usually blog about technical details here, we’re so crushingly enamored with Amazon S3 and EC2 that we felt compelled to write a short post about it…We did some quick math and realized we save quite a bit of money using S3 to serve our photos…We’ve made good use of EC2, a great way of getting computing power when you need it, and more when you need more.”

Spock certainly needs more computing power today, the most important day of its short business life to date: Official launch day.

SEE Spock vs. Facebook People Search Smackdown

Spock is not performing, though. Blog coverage of the launch has been stymied by frequent difficulties in accessing Spock and inordinate delays for page downloads.

Did Spock launch prematurely? The Spock “Jobs” page indicates that the startup needs to beef up its engineering. Spock is looking for:

Web Developer
Server Engineer
Operations manager
Information Retreival Engineer
MySQL DBA
Director of Engineering
Director of India Operations

Spock founder and CEO echoes Google in declaring his worldwide ambitions: “We plan to eventually index everyone in the world.”

Spock is NOT emulating Google, however, on launch day in infrastructure peformance and Website availability.

ALSO: Hearst Buys Kaboodle: Social Shopping or Editorial eCommerce? and $1 billion YouTube Killer? NBC, Fox JV: Deal or No Deal

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN

Facebook wantonly issued a not so veiled warning to Google at the Facebook blog last month: ““Do we really need to write our own search engine?” A Facebook “Tech Lead,” Aditya Agarwal, had the honor of crowning Facebook its own self-descibed “most used people search engine on the Web.”

REALLY? Not only is Google NOT conceeding any such thing, either is Spock, its own self-described “online leader in personal search”:

“With over one hundred million people already indexed and millions added every day, Spock is building the broadest and deepest people specific search engine.”

The Spock search engine, according to Spock:

Spock is a search engine that focuses its results on people. You can enter your query into the empty text field on the top of the home page, and click search to find people.

Spock basic search uses three different types of information:

• Name: When searching by names, you can search by first, last, or full name to find people on Spock.
• E-mail Address: Enter an e-mail address in the search bar, and if it’s in Spock’s database, the corresponding profile will be returned.
• Tag: Words or short phrases that describe a person, like “libertarian” or “fighter pilot”.

Spock not so modestly claims to have an “omnipotent database.” Notably apparently absent, however, is the Facebook in the Spock database!

MySpace friends and LinkedIn professionals are present and accounted for, but where in the world is Mark Zuckerberg’s social graph? The closed and/or open Facebook does not come into play for Facebook fan Jeff Pulver at Spock, as the screenshot below illustrates.

Pulver has publicly ditched LinkedIn and cites Facebook as his forwarding address. Nevertheless, Spock likes Pulver at LinkedIn, not Facebook (there is apparently still a live Pulver profile at LinkedIn). 

Does the absence of Facebook profile information at Spock for Jeff Pulver validate the Facebook purported value proposition that it is a privacy “safe haven”? NO! I debunked THAT Facebook notion yesterday in Facebook Profile Hijacked: Beware the Dangerous OPEN Social Graph.

Flaunting Facebook’s own Terms of Service, a Facebook profile was hijacked in the name of media sensationalism; Lucy Morrow Caldwell, under the Washington Post/Slate banner, took a screenshot of Caroline Giuliani’s private profile and posted it to the open Web for the world to see.

Facebook code was not manipulated, something worse was: The integrity of the Facebook social graph. Facebook is NOT an open Web site, but it is not a protected social safe haven, either.

Facebook vs. Spock nevertheless? If Facebook has no Google fear, it can face off with Spock as well.

SEE: Facebook Fans Trash Talk LinkedIn: Will Reid Hoffman Fight Back? and Mark Zuckerberg: Use Facebook at Your Own Risk!

PLUS: Friend Spam: Robert Scoble and Facebook vs. Twitter vs. LinkedIn and Spock Loves Amazon Web Services: Why Poor Site Performance on Launch Day?

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN