Global Moxie

Photo © Paramount Pictures.

What’s in a name? In my case, a Star Trek officer.

I have the Google-crippling misfortune of sharing a name with the actor Josh Clark, who had a recurring role on the Star Trek Voyager series. Alas, it seems that Google has more regard for galactic federations than for global moxies. The interstellar Josh Clark makes his star turn several times in the Google results before I finally limp my way onto the page behind a handful of other earthbound Josh Clarks.

Consider the plight of the hundreds (thousands! millions!) of people trying to find out more about yours truly, only to get caught up in a nebula of Josh Clark parallel dimensions. Call it my Star Trek problem, a disruption in the Google search continuum.

We all have some version of this problem, of course. By now Google has introduced just about everyone to their moniker doppelgangers. And when searching for people, we’ve all had the frustrating experience of combing the results for the real McCoy. Given that 30 percent of web searches are people-related,^[1] it’s surprising that search companies haven’t put more effort into helping us sort out individuals.

Good news: Spock may have the answer to the Star Trek problem. I’m not talking about the pointy-eared science officer, either.

Spock.com is a people search engine that is slated to launch this week in a couple of months (it’s currently in private beta testing). Tim O’Reilly and Michael Arrington have both recently offered previews of the service, and it seems compelling. From Tim’s review:

You can search for a class of person, say politicians, or people associated with a topic -- say Ruby on Rails. The spock robot automatically creates tags for any person it finds (and it gathers information on people from Wikipedia, social networking sites like LinkedIn and Facebook), but it also lets users add tags of their own, and vote existing tags up or down to strengthen the associations between people and topics. Users can also identify relationships between people (friend, co-worker, etc.), upload pictures, and provide other types of information.

In other words, Spock promises to gather and organize all of the various information and links about a person onto a single profile page. Unlike Google, where a single person can dominate search results and make it difficult to find average folks, every person gets just one result in Spock. Since you can narrow searches by field or affiliation, finding the right person suddenly becomes much easier.

This Is Your Life

Google CEO Eric Schmidt's profile at Spock. Photo via Tim O'Reilly. Click to enlarge.

As a developer, though, I find the single summary page to be particularly interesting. If it works as advertised, it has the potential to provide a single URL to sum up a person’s online identity. That kind of canonical address for people has been elusive but strikes me as both powerful and important.

The TV show This Is Your Life presented the lives of its guests (celebrities and everyday people alike) by way of a hefty book consulted by the host. It was a good gimmick, and there was something charming in the idea that your own life story might be out there somewhere in a handsome, single-edition volume.

We could really use the equivalent of a “this is your life” book online. At the moment, no such single web reference exists for people. For better or worse, Wikipedia pages have emerged as an it’ll-do substitute for a standard URL reference for notable people, but often at the expense of more reliable sources and without much help for the not-so-notable.

There’s real value in having a single standard URL for, well, just about anything. I had the good fortune of attending a talk in London last year by the ever-interesting Tom Coates. He described best practices for participating in our ever-growing web of data and, in particular, how developers can cultivate and contribute searchable data to the web. Principal among his points was the importance of giving primary data objects single, permanent URLs. Everything in your website, in other words, should have a single home with one and only one URL. Among other things, this makes it easy for outside sites and services to find and reference your content. It makes the web a better place.

Things like news articles and products tend to have a single address on the web, since these items are typically controlled by a single organization and site. Not so for people. We’re complicated and crafty creatures who spread, tribble-like, across the net, across organizations, across activities. I have many homes: my blog, my company, my flickr account, my past employers, my past projects, my music, my bookmarks, my alma mater, you name it. Ironically, the more that you participate online, the more difficult it is to capture a defined picture of who you are on the web, certainly not via a single URL.

After his talk, Tom was kind enough to indulge a few of my questions, and we talked about the challenge of correlating external IDs. That is, how should a website or app refer to data that it does not control, particularly when that data is spread out across multiple sites? How to create a single URL to represent that kind of distributed data?

Tom admitted that there was not yet a good answer for that one but that he imagined that we could eventually develop URLs that point to link clouds, clusters of URLs that all reference the same topic and in aggregate provide a coherent description. His hope was that a service would emerge that could find the affinities among various URLs to create a canonical identity for people, films, events, etc.

“What have you done with Spock’s brain?”

Photo © Paramount Pictures.

This seems to be exactly what Spock promises to do, for people at least, but much depends on Spock’s smarts. Neither gathering the info nor separating out individuals is an easy task (Spock proposes a clever mix of web spidering and community contributions, but they’re offering $50,000 to the coder who can make it better). There are also spam and privacy issues to consider in all of this.

Whether or not Spock gets it right, people search and identity aggregation is a problem that’s crying out to be solved, and it’s starting to look like that might happen sooner rather than later. At a minimum, Spock’s early preview press suggests that its approach points in the right direction.

Meantime, as a developer, I’d like to know how I can help. How can Big Medium generate pages in a way that helps search engines make people-smart associations? Is it through microformats? Will a format emerge to let developers tag pages with an individual’s unique ID and indicate how they’re affiliated to the page? Will there be an API that lets web applications fetch the data, or at least the URL, for individuals?

Looking forward to seeing how this shakes out. At the very least, I’m hoping that Spock will help this Josh Clark to escape my Star Trek captors.

Tags: search, socialmedia, spock, tags, webservices