A Bad Day at the Office or Never Attribute to Malice

Last week, the team at Spock had a very bad day at the office and it was largely my fault.

In my earlier post, It May be the Evil Spock, I invoked a powerful word.  Evil.  I passed this post amongst my tribe and they all blessed the word evil.  I wanted to make sure I hadn't gone too far.  When the tribunal had spoken, Spock was evil.

After thousands of page views and a bunch of comments and several posts by others, Spock is reeling in the court of public opinion.  And most of these opinions jump on the condemnation bandwagon.

One of the comments was from Jay Bhatti at Spock.  Surprisingly, Jay did not think of himself or Spock as evil.  Well, that's just crazy!  Of course he's evil. 

So, this made me wonder .. what exactly is evil?  And what, exactly would make Spock evil?  Is evil correctable?

What is evil?

In the search to learn about all things evil, of course, I went to the 21st century CliffsNotes - Wikipedia.  (Which makes Jimmy Wales the 21st Century Clifton Hillegass).

Wikipedia is a great memory jogger.  Soon synapses that had long ago been shoved to the back burner - memories of Spinoza and Nietzsche.  Memories of trudging across frozen Michigan snow on my way to early morning classes.

So ... here's the deal. 

Evil is a fluid concept and a loaded term.  In it's nitpicky form, an Evil act is a harmful act caused from ignorance.  Let's call this "Oops! Evil".

In it's more loaded form, an Evil act is caused by an Evil person with malicious intent.  Let's call this "Haha! Evil".

Practitioners of Oops! Evil learn from the evil act and do NOT do it again.  Practitioners of Haha! Evil learn from the evil act and DO do it again (hopefully in an even eviler way.)

Is the Evil Spock Oops! or Haha!?

Jay's long comment on my Evil Spock post shows a few things that should be appreciated:

1. Jay and Spock understand the need to respond to flame with cool water. 

2. Jay and Spock are thoughtful and understand that Spock needs to be refined

3. Jay and Spock have spent considerable time thinking about the issues behind the collection and redistribution of personal information.

Currently, Spock is Oops! Evil.  They are not malicious.  But they do have a bit of work to do to make up for this.

Can they do it?  Certainly.  If Plaxo can dig their way out of their PR hole, anyone can.

Spock has potential

In my post that preceded the Evil Spock post, I said that Spock did some really needed things.  Most notably, it lets you really coordinate your network.  Recently (like late this week), Facebook started to allow the same thing - but Spock's implementation is better.  This would be a post in itself, so I'll just say that Spock is a better platform for this because Facebook's business model is so chaotic.  Spock is much cleaner.

Direct Response to Jay Bhatti

Please do go read Jay's long comment on the Evil Spock post.  Then come back and read my replies.  I don't want my quotes to remove any of his context.

Before I respond I also want to say that a blog post is like a text chat, so my aim here is to be perfectly clear to Jay and Spock what my issues are and how they can be mitigated.  If I seem a bit forceful, it is due to the medium.

So, here we go:

Jay's first comment: We don't trick people.

... we NEVER send unsolicited email ... I hope this can clarify the issue some people raised above that we trick people to send invites. I have been trying to improve the process  as much as possible to make it more clear.

I hear the earnestness behind these statements.  The issue here is that the system makes it seem that people are on Spock when they actually are not.  "Trick" like "Evil" is a loaded word ... I don't think that Spock or Jay specifically set out to mislead people, but the current architecture is misleading.

This is an Oops.  It's also the reason for the invite flood.  People are assuming they are linking to someone already in the system, not sending an invite.  I know the system may be presenting these as slightly different - but the user isn't getting the message.

Jay's second comment: Spock's other reasons for invite flooding.

(paraphrased) Spock assumed that people in your address book was known to you.  Unfortunately, many email clients save anyone you've ever emailed or received an email from - so lots of people in your mail client are total strangers.  ....

This is compounded by the fact that many early Spockers were recruiters, biz dev consultants and others who have a vested interest in a giant network.

I did paraphrase here, so please do read his original and judge my work.

I appreciate the fact that Jay is airing a bit of laundry here and acknowledging something very important about social networking tools.

Different people have different strategies for applying their social networks.

The type of people Jay mentions in the second paragraph have a vested interest in having gigantic weak networks.  Their business model is based on breadth and not depth. 

The email issue is also very important.  When I sign up for a system like Spock and it taps my email list to seed my network, I am always saying "Who the hell is that?"  It works against my personal social networking strategy to include weak or unknown contacts.  But for those other guys, they will add me no matter how tenuous the connection.

Oddly, Spock's tagging tool which lets you organize your contacts makes it the first tool to really let you self-filter your massive networks.  So, even though this is an invite problem - Spock's architecture allows you to deal with large networks after they form.  Organizationally, Spock has this covered - socially it was a bomb.

So, how do we deal with things like this?  How do we deal with friend-whores who go out to collect every name in humanity's phone book and, in the process, fill your inbox with invites from people you don't know?

That's a big one.

Jay's third comment:  We adhere to standard search engine rules.

We crawl the web the same way any other search engine does, we adhere to every robots.txt file from every site and we only crawl information in the public domain. ...

This is cool, but most people have no idea what a robots.txt file is.  And no one has any control over the robots.txt files on sites like LinkedIn and Facebook. 

Here is a conversation that I am so confident in, I will type it as it happens right now:

Jim: On your Elocution Seattle site, how did you set your robots.txt file?

Jim's wife: I don't know.

So, I'm afraid I see this as a bit of a cop out.  Jon Udell has a great post today (much more succinct than me, I'm afraid) where he welcomes Spock's coming simply because it brings issue like this to light.

People's expectations of their data, while naive, is that it will not be used without their knowledge.  This will help people streamline their data.  But, as Jon points out, the crawlers are never accurate enough to filter out the difference between personal attributes and the topics of writing.

Also, as I noted before, names are not unique IDs, so building a massive database based on a non-unique ID is problematic.

Jay's fourth comment:  We present good information

In the process of crawling, we do gather a lot of information about people. We made a decision .. that we wanted to represent people in their best light, and not in a creepy way. We try to never display publicly identifiable information (email, address, phone number, im, etc), even if we gathered it from a public source. We just don't think it is cool to show PII.

This is a good start, but doesn't seem to have served Spock well.  I know that if I went in and looked around again, I'd find more pages declaring me to be an astronaut.  I am very grateful that no Jim Bensons have done anything particularly nasty.

Unlike presidents.  Neither George Bush nor Bill Clinton have taken the time to claim their Spock pages which are being systematically and ideologically defaced. 

When I did a search for pedophile, I found 156 results.  156 people directly labeled by Spock as a pedophile.  Somehow, I'm sure none of them stopped by and okay'ed that label. 

It doesn't do a person a whole lot of good to protect their IM account over their reputation.

 Jay's fifth comment:  You can change it

We also allow people to claim their search result and remove wrong information and add information that they want to be searched on. If people want data removed, we have a easy process for them to get that data removed.

I'm going out on a limb here ... "Allowing" me to join your site and edit my data that you have misinterpreted is not a luxury for me as a user.

My personal advice here ... seed your database with people's personal information - but do not broadcast it publicly until it has been claimed.  The seed data should be to help me, as a user, quickly set up my Spock account - it should not be a threat (even an unintentional one) that makes me come to the site and clean up the messy after affects of a crawler they never sanctioned.

This is the biggest issue, messy data on your side will quickly bring a response for an accepted and open-source reputation management system.  People will lose their faith in companies that play by the accepted corporate rules but appear not to respect the people impacted by those rules.

Summing up:

It is hard to provide detail about problems without seeming negative.  Problems are negative.  It's not my goal here to take Jay to the cleaners, but to help Spock get even better - and thereby increase the effectiveness of social networking and social media in general.

I'm sorry to have caused a few bad days at the Spock offices, but I hope that in the end it'll make the product better.

Technorati Tags: spock, jay bhatti, jon udell, social networking, social media, evil, wikipedia

Comments

[Sam Rose]

Saying that they are basically doing the same thing as Google, or other search engines, is flat out wrong.

True, Spock is spidering and collecting data, like google does. But, Spock is then presenting that data in ways that are at times massively out of context, and often actually meaningless, or damaging, and then hoping that a "Community" of people will come along and re-contextualize.

This kind of "data vacuum" model is rather ham-fisted, and offers very little value up front. Basically, I don't have the time, or the will, or want to go manage my personal data presence on yet another social networking website, especially when we all now know that the business model for these sites is to "flip" them over to a bigger company, to cash in on our collective time and activity. Now, when I see an invite from almost *any* social networking site, I won't participate unless they are reciprocating back LOTS of value to me and other users.

So, what I can do with Spock? Looks like basically I can annotate mis-contextualized scraped data about myself and others, from SN sites, blogs and other websites. Once I clean it up, then what do I get out of it? Not much, really, from what I can see. "What's in it for me?" Not much, "Am I Being Used?" Yes, because the value is flowing in one direction (from me, to Spock).

Spock could actually be a valuable service, if it had some kin dof *valuable* way to contextualize the data. Hell, if Spock contextualized data in valuable, I would not even be so worried about the fact that they scraped my identities on other public sites and then re-posted that info without my permission.

Of the top of my head, I could think of some ways to add some kind of useful value:

* Maybe Spock could create some plausible/workable way to scrape data about me, and then recommend other people, information, resources, groups, etc to me?

* Maybe Spock could present data in a way that is more useful and re-usable, and invite people to participate in cleaning up data in a systematic way that turns the data into a real useful, and open licensed data commons? Spock might argue that this is what they are trying to do now, but I think that the "facets" of data presented are not so valuable, and are framing people in inaccurate ways. So, Spock could add value by *solving the problem of how to scrape data about people, and present that data in accurate ways*. Also, being careful to allow people to opt out, or even better, to opt0in in the first place.

The only reason to go the "big foist" route, and force people to come in and clean up, or to opt out after the fact, (that I can see) is that this is a race to make money as fast as possible.

Spock people, please help me understand where the value is in Spock? What good does it do me to see a mis-contextualized collection of web-based info about me, and why should I do the work of cleaning it up for you? What do I get out of it?

[Andrey Golub]

I think the comment of Sam is very deep and logical, and then at the end some great suggestions to Spock for how to make the service even better- way to go!
still for Sam- if you could have a serious wish to communicate some of your ideas to Spock, for how it could be useful better as an On-Line Identity Management tool (since I see you do not speak so much about Search Engine but mostly about Digital ID MGMT)- you may want to join the Spock Supporters Fan Club 2.0 :), a Facebook Group about Spock-
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=19789337936

now my personal comment part-
of course Spock isn't doing "the same as Google", first of all because Google is a "classical" Search Engine, working very quickly and effectively- but able to look at the web pages only. Spock could be compared with Google 2.0 if such existed, but it does not (yet?) exist :)

I think it should be clear that on the first phase of the project launch, the most important for Spock was to collect a critical mass of profiles, then to convert them to users. w/o this it could never be possible to implement in a future a really good service for community, right?
So the guys were mostly concerned about Network expansion, at the same time polishing their main arm- PEOPLE SEARCH. Of course Spock is not a Social Network, it's something much bigger and complex, including also SN as a key component.
Community powered People Search- is what makes Spock really different from any other Pages/People Search Engine. And although we all know there exist already few People Search Engines, those are all (most) "closed boxes", the take-it-as-it-is service, so could never be considered as an Online Identity Management platform. Spock has made a step towards the real Search Engine 2.0- they opened Search to the Community, so everyone is able, as mentioned by Sam, cleaning up and filling properly the own data, and then take care of the other people's profiles. Today some other projects are becoming opened, and this just once again demonstrates that the vision was correct?
So with Spock we get a) people search engine + b) online identity management tool + c) search engine 2.0.
not too bad for a beta?

and if you could think about the spelling of SPOCK, that is "Single Point Of Contact (by) Keyword", and its mission to become the single point not only of Contact but in the future also of Entrance to the Web/ Web 2.0 world (that's easily possible today with help of OpenSocial, DataPortability etc)- you'd probably not looked at Spock as just a search engine, right?

Have a nice spocking :)
Kind Regards,
Andrey Golub- a Spock Evangelist and Blogger
http://www.spock.com/Andrey-Golub

[Kenneth Udut]

I don't think the sky is falling. Spock flavored fire & brimstone (if Spock were an "oops! evil"), would taste more like Skittles or gumdrops falling from the sky, not sulfur and heat.

Is there a potential for OTHER scrapers to come along and scoop up SPOCK data and reconstitute it into an evil blend? Sure, that's possible - but no worse than what is already done with Myspace or what Google does. Data scraping done by Spock works off of existing, already easily findable systems. It's just repackaged in a friendly web 2.0 format.

Perhaps I'm naive. I did have an old work associate grumble a little about my spock request, saying, "I'm concerned about the privacy issues of joining another network". And he does have a point. He need not join Spock.com. He's careful about what he releases online and it shows - he's a very hard man to find online.

But I don't see what spock is doing as anything different than wink, or zoominfo, or ziki. At least they're all free to play along with spock. Intelius is the one that I didn't care for. "Hey, here's you and everybody related to you, everybody's ages and past addresses. Give us $10 and we'll search court records too". Spock isn't digging any much deeper than what you could find on Google or Yahoo.

In any case, I LOVE Spock, so it is hard for me to find fault. I think the potential of spock is astounding, and while the potential for danger is there (as it is for most things in life) - I think it's minimal. The upbeat, positive attitude one has with Spock, the cheerful upbeat colors, the easy to use interface -- I just can't fault it.

Bad people will try to infiltrate every system. All you can do is take each case at a time and not be overly paranoid. If one worries about their online reputation, then they should watch what they post, and spock themselves once in a while.

It's more likely than not that nobody is out to get you.

The sky is still in the sky.

Kenneth Udut
http://www.spock.com/Kenneth-Udut

[Jim Benson]

Thanks Kenneth,

I'm not sure what you are responding to.

I really wasn't worried about the issues you are describing.

I was more concerned with the inappropriate aggregation of unrelated information.

Jim