I sat down at my desk this morning only to discover at least a dozen invitations to "trust" my colleagues over at Spock.com. According to their site:

Spock is a search application that organizes information around people. The Spock vision is to create a search result of everyone in the world.

Of course, instead of working on my next workshop presentation, I immediately spent the next 45 minutes engaged in ar'kadan -- poking around and adding tags to my profile. I can't tell you how useful this tool may or may not end up being, but it certainly had a Vulcan death grip on my attention. (Cue laugh track.)

Have you tried Spock.com? What do you think?

NTEN member (and board member) Michelle Murrain shared an opinion on the Information Systems Forum last week:

Spock does seem interesting in that it uses "trust" rather than "friend" or "connection" as the metaphor for its social graph. This might actually make it more useful - I imagine people are much less likely to put people they don't really know in their "trust" network on Spock, whereas there is a real range of opinion about how well you need to know someone to get to be their "friend" on Facebook.

But what's "missing" (deliberately?) are messaging systems and groups. This means that it's not so useful for advocacy or fundraising as Facebook.

Oh - and hat tip to the Vulcan Language Dictionary. "Tonk'peh" translates to "Hello".