Well I asked to be introduced to Spock (I wrote about Spock last year), not the guy below, BTW - though I would not mind meeting him too.

Seriously, Tim O'Reilly says that Spock, the people search engine, is finally to launch (and I did ask for an invite, again).

"..Disambiguating people, and then collapsing multiple sources of information into a single entry, or entity resolution, is part of the secret sauce of a people search engine. (More on that in a followup post, since Spock wants your help in making this aspect of their software even better.) Mechanisms for ranking people are also going to be critical. "

There's so much data out there but most of it is not that useful - I can see where Spock might change reputation management and even SEO within 6 months of going live.  But since I have not seen it yet, it's all speculation at this point.  Spock also allows search results about people to be updated by anyone:

"…will people go to the trouble of updating people's pages on Spock? First off, individuals can claim their own page, and clearly have an interest in it. (It will be interesting to see how Spock balances people's desire to manage their own image with the public data the search engine finds. It will also be very interesting to see how successfully they manage spamming of tags, websites associated with people, and other user-contributed data. They do allow users to vote information up or down, but that may or may not be enough. I'll bet that entries on prominent people end up needing to be closed. There are also issues with the semantics of related people. I was able to add Larry and Sergey as co-workers, but is that really the right way to describe their relationship? As with tags, there's a huge amount of room for nuance, disagreement, and outright error. This private beta of Spock exposes the tips of many icebergs, some of which have the power to sink one feature or another.)  "

I'll wait and see - once I test "Spock" out - I'll have more to say - but O'Reilly already likes one aspect of Spock no one has, Private Tags:

"…What really gets me excited is that I'm told that Spock plans to support private tags, so you can manage your own people information spaces. This will also have a powerful network effect, in that people will be motivated to upload their address books and other lists. How much more useful to me would be a Spock-ified list of O'Reilly authors than the simple database we now keep them in, or a list of our conference speakers? In a lot of ways, my business is based on the ability to find the right person, the person who knows the most about a given topic and can write about it, or present about it at a conference, or point to other interesting people. It's also based on keeping track of people. When we're planning the invitation list for an event, we're often poring over a spreadsheet — and asking ourselves, who was that again? Spock pulls together a relevant summary for each person, making it a great outboard memory connecting names, faces, topics and companies."

It looks like Spock will launch any day but if the founders of Spock want me to look at it before the launch, I'll be happy to.