Beth Kanter is expressing second thoughts about Spock. She points to a post by Nancy White where Nancy simply says Ick! And Please, don’t invite me to Spock. Nancy points to posts my Jim Benson about his initial response to Spock and his suggestion that It may be the evil Spock.

I’ve read the concerns. I’ve thought about them in the context of the discussions on Reputation Economies in Cyberspace (RepEcon) and I have to say that I still like Spock. I think the concerns are overstated.

The first concern is that Spock has gone out and scraped websites, including LinkedIn, MySpace and others. This does not bother me. I am very conscious that the information that I’ve put on sites like LinkedIn and MySpace is very public information. In my case, I’ve been deliberate about what I put up there. I like to take an active role in attempting to manage my reputation online. To me, Spock’s aggregation of this information and the ability for me to tag and rate the information is a good thing.

I find it curious that some of the critics are the same people that argue for using open protocols to do similar sort of things, cross linking social networks, and this gets to a key initial criticism. Spock is not as open as open source purists might like. To tie this back to RepEcon, we have the question of who owns reputation data online? Who has the right to modify it? It seems like Spock is doing a good job in handling who gets to modify information, but the aspects of who owns the underlying information has not been dealt with well. Perhaps if I could import and export data as hCards and FOAF, and other formats, I would feel a little better about it.

Another concern is about how Spock will read your address books and send invites based on them, if you allow them to. I’ve invited people using my address books and found that Spock has been very respectful of who I want to invite and who I don’t want to invite. I don’t recall if I sent an invite to Nancy. If I did, it was before I read her post and I apologize. Related to that is the concern about how you have to sign up to be able to make changes. Personally, I think that is a good thing. It makes the system more trustworthy. Hey, if you find things you don’t like about yourself on Spock and you’re a friend of mine, drop me a note. I’ll make changes for you if you don’t want to join.

My bigger concerns, which I’ve touched on before is Spock’s inability to recognize context. Quirky might be a very accurate and relevant tag for me, within the family dining room context. By it might be completely inaccurate and irrelevant within the context of financial services consulting. Another aspect of context is time. Longhaired would have been an accurate tag for me years ago. Balding is more accurate now. Right now, I think I’m tagged as brown-haired. Yet that is rapidly changing to gray-haired, for those hairs that remain.

Likewise, context is ignored in trust relationships. As I noted before I trust Deborah for information about nonprofit information technology, but not for recommendations on the best sports car to buy. For that matter, I would love to see the ability to rank the trusts, perhaps on a scale of 1 to 10. Put simply, there are some people I trust more than other people.

So, is Spock all that it could be? Well “Be all that you can be” was the slogan of the U.S. Army for many years. I hope that it isn’t part of some U.S. Intelligence effort to spy citizens, but if it ends up having useful information, I expect they will want to use it. That digression aside, no, Spock is not all that it could be. On the other hand, they’ve only been around for a little while, and hopefully, they are getting the kinks worked out.