i've been an advisor for Spock for almost a year now, and i'm really psyched they are finally launching publicly and moving into open beta. the site started getting pounded by visitors yesterday due to some early French television coverage, but i think this morning will be the real test when the site is live for everyone. hope all their scalability prep is able to handle it, but regardless it will be an interesting day... heh.
one Spock feature most people haven't seen yet is the ability to use Spock widgets to display "mini-profiles" of people, or groups of profiles based on a search term or phrase... what i like to call "instant top 10 lists". these are pretty cool to use on a blog or website, and enable viewers to click thru to the associated Spock profiles and "vote" on any tag (up or down), or add new tags. (note: now that Spock is in open beta, anyone can view Spock profiles or search results without being logged in to Spock; however if you want to vote on a tag or add a new tag, you will have to login... this is done to prevent tag spam, so there's no anonymous tagging of anyone as a "facebook fanboy"... ahem)
Here is my Spock mini-profile:
(please feel free to vote up the "facebook fanboy" tag)
Here is a list of top 10 "web 2.0" people according to Spock:
(surprised john battelle isn't #1 or #2 on this result; guessing once the community starts voting he will rise to the top)
more Spock coverage by VentureBeat, Searchblog, Mashable, TechCrunch, and on Techmeme soon.
I have two profiles...one tied to me, the other not. I have been trying to claim it since last Wednesday and I keep getting a bug:
uh oh...blah blah blah
This isn't a bandwidth issue anymore. Seems like a crappy software issue.
Posted by: Sean Ness | Tuesday, August 14, 2007 at 09:18 PM
Dave, where are the RSS feeds?
Posted by: Dimitar Vesselinov | Thursday, August 09, 2007 at 12:22 PM
hey sean: indeed, they have spent a year trying to prepare for scalability issues, however it's still pretty difficult to handle hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of new users coming to your site for the first time simultaneously. give them a few days and i'm sure they'll adjust.
as to why it keeps happening again with many different sites & services: i think that speaks to why it's so hard. if it were easy, we wouldn't see it keep happening. however, with the number of people online these days and the power of sites like TechCrunch & others to direct traffic your way, it's not easy to scale upto the equivalent of a small Google-size new user community.
anyway, no excuses they need to get their shit together to handle the increase in volume, but i think in general that's a good problem for them to have... only painful if they don't fix it in a few days. eBay, Yahoo, PayPal, Facebook, many other large sites have had to deal with outages due to the crush of users. it appears Spock will have to go thru the same learning pains, based on how many people are interested in using it.
peace out,
- dmc
Posted by: Dave | Wednesday, August 08, 2007 at 09:39 AM
Why is it that when a new site finally goes public...it is slow as hell or crashes? These guys had a year to prepare for this. Is crashing and pokiness done on purpose these days? To create buzz? Like when an empty club keeps a line outside? This is getting to be a very tired phenomena. Hey guys...write cleaner software, pony up for better database hw/sw, lease some good pipes...
I'm just a sales noob...but can someone explain to why this happens again and again and again?
Posted by: Sean Ness | Wednesday, August 08, 2007 at 09:06 AM
Looks like their servers are already struggling to keep up...but the first couple of days are always a tough step! The widgets are pretty cool...would be interesting to track their change over time.
Posted by: Brian Walsh | Wednesday, August 08, 2007 at 02:17 AM