Spock attacks the identity crisis

Two days ago I got Spocked! I'm impressed with their approach to solving the identity crisis:

- Index as many external "people" sites (linkedin, plaxo, address books from the largest webmail providers, DBLP bibliography database, etc., etc.)

- Let users invite each other into trust networks

- Let users tag each other with relevant attributes

- Let users vote on tags

- Allow users to tag relations -- i.e., assert a relation between two different people. Other than in Freebase I haven't seen this, but Spock is much more liberal, allowing any type of relation (with the flip side of not establishing inverse relations).

- Use all the resulting metrics (believability of a tag based on votes, authority of a user based on number of correct tags, social metric of people according to relations with other people and their authority) to create an equivalent to pagerank (Spock Power)

- And the kicker; allow users to merge records about people

Obviously the latter one is a huge contributor to solving the identity crisis using collective intelligence. I think Spock recognizes the power of particularly that type of contribution because after I merged a couple of records about people I know, my Spock power went from 161 to 1729!

There has been a lot of discussion on the (lack of) ethics of the Spock team here and obviously they will have major hurdles fighting spam, but the Spock uri (e.g. mine is http://www.spock.com/Jasper-Kamperman-z32I1yG ) might become a pretty usable online identity.

But being in the top 1% of users after only two hours of tagging and merging and the top 1000 leader board having scores as low as 2,500 leads me to believe their number of users is less than a million -- which includes a lot of europeans. So they don't appear to cover a very large part of the web just yet.