Spoke.com, a social 'notwork' according to some
Yesterday, a co-worker asked me if I was familiar with the social network Spoke.com. When I told her I'd never heard of it she seemed a bit surprised. Priding myself on knowing anything and everything conversational media marketing related, I immediately checked it out.
Spoke bills itself as the "open network for business people" where a member can have access to "40 million people at over 2.3 million companies via email, phone, postal address or your personal network."
After reviewing the site for a few minutes, I did something very Web 2.0. I asked my Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn networks if they had heard of Spoke and what their impressions were. That's when I learned "the rest of the story."
One respondent to my query said...
"I am personally boycotting Spoke. They utilize some sort of technology to cobble together information about you that may or may not be accurate.
At least several months ago, I registered in order to verify what it was saying about me and it wouldn't let me edit the profile it had built. They told me they were working on this.
When I asked them to delete the profile, they insisted it wasn't me. My name is pretty unique and the information contained in the profile was too close to home for it to be anyone else. So Spoke is a big no no in my book."
Another sent me a link to a post titled Spoke.com is Evil. The blogger, Phil Yanov, begins the post by saying, "Spoke.com has built a scheme to capture and then sell the personal contact information of practically everyone connected via e-mail. The plan is genius -- evil genius."
In fact, a on the term "Spoke.com" shows Phil's post appearing as the 2nd return just beneath a link to the company's Web site.
Look, I have no personal axe to grind where Spoke is concerned. At this point, I've not tried the service, so any opinions I've formed come second hand. However, I do have an axe to grind with any service, whether it be Spoke, Facebook, or whomever, that refuses to respect my privacy and that of my contacts.
Word-of-mouth is powerful, and people do respect the opinions of others like themselves. Considering what I've read from the sources cited above, I won't become a Spoke member anytime soon.
Bottom line: Spoke has a problem and it's one they brought upon themselves. Caveat emptor.
Hi Paul,
You raise some interesting issues and I’d like to address them from the Spoke perspective.
First your friend is right.
Or was.
The latest version of our site, released on Monday, allows people to claim and edit the profile they’ve built. That said it should also be noted that we have suppressed the profile of everyone who has requested this from us. Period. We had a backlog so it took some time to catch up on this but we now fill those requests within 48 hours of getting them (unless they arrive at the start of a holiday weekend. We take days off, too.)
The thing about the Spoke is Evil post – and you can read this in the comments section of the post – is that it is just flat out and factually wrong.
Here’s what I wrote at Phil Yanov’s site:
“Let me be clear about one thing though: at Spoke all we do is check people's names and job titles to verify that the information we have already gathered from public sources is accurate. Any information that someone chooses to upload is theirs and theirs alone to use. We do not publish anyone's phone number or email address or physical address. Go look it up. Check out the information on your profile. It will have the corporate HQ address and the main number for your company. If this isn't true, please please call me a liar. Shout it. Post it. We deserve nothing less.”
What you say about us having a word-of-mouth problem is clearly true. You read Phil’s post and didn’t wade all the way to the end of the bazillion or so comments to see our point-of-view. As a result you wrote, “However, I do have an axe to grind with any service, whether it be Spoke, Facebook, or whomever, that refuses to respect my privacy and that of my contacts.”
I’m pretty proud of what we do around privacy issues. We let people decide what if any information they put on our site. That information is visible only to the person who uploaded it and not to us or anyone else. Here’s exactly what it says in the EULA: “Your Submitted Information may be aggregated with data collected from other users of the Service; the resulting aggregated data forms the basis for the Service. The name, title, and company of the people identified from Your Submitted Information may be made visible to other users as a part of the Service. None of the detailed contact information from Your Submitted Information is made visible to other users through the Service unless you permit us to do so.
I can’t force you to try Spoke and see what we do and we don’t do. I can’t force Phil to retract his post. (We could try but it would involve lawyers – yuck -- and, more importantly to us, it’s not how we like to do business). But as you said –- and proved -- we do have this problem. So whenever I see a post like yours I put up something and hope the writer will do a little more homework and see what the facts are. I hope the facts will eventually carry the day. We aren’t perfect, but we sure as heck aren’t evil either.
Posted by: Con von Hoffman | December 12, 2007 at 03:03 PM