A new people-focused content site called WikiYou launches this morning out of beta. Generally speaking it is a “wikipedia for people” with a social network bolted on. The focus is is on biographies and stories about individuals. Much of the content is wiki-like, allowing anyone to edit it.
The company, which was started by Bolt.com founders Jay Gould and Aaron Cohen, is very much like the unlaunched Spock, which we profiled here. And while they beat Spock to launch, Spock is in my opinion the better site. And there are lots of other competitors, too.
When you join WikiYou, you can create or claim a profile. You then add a picture and biographical data to the profile, and you can add friends. The main area of any profile is reserved for stories about the person (example), which can be revised by others. Stuff written by power users who’ve proven reliable goes on top and is circled in yellow. Everyone else’s content is below.
Spock, by comparison, has no story-driven content about people. It’s all metadata from other sites and user uploaded pictures and tags. Also, Spock doesn’t have a social network component. It’s pure people content and search. Still, Spock has already proven to be very interesting, driving people to add and vote on tags for people, add related individuals to create connections, etc. WikiYou doesn’t seem to have these attractions, and I suspect people will largely find the site boring.
WikiYou raised a seed round of approximately $500,000 from Mayfield, First Round Capital and Reid Hoffman in December 2006. Bolt.com also owns a percentage of the company in return for services.
Wikipedia and Wikia has been very successful. A wiki and social network all in one sounds great. We love all in one web apps.
Sign me up
Hmm… Just tried their advanced Location based people search and it throws highly irrelevant results. Now i tried again and no results for the same search.
I personally like cleaner interfaces and this is one of them, though they have a lot of room for improvement.
Yet another SNS in disguise.
“Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of a person — the biography of the person himself cannot be written.”
whats the diff btw this and aboutus.org except that it’s for people. will people have the ability to edit their own page? i don’t like this idea at all.
plus the registration process is not well thoughtout – took me several minutes to figure that out.
what happens if there are multiple michael arrington’s – how does it handle that? for example, we know there at least two michael boltons – the singer and the guy in office space
I’m wondering about the possibility of developing people focused wikis related to horrible crimes, such as the Holocaust. I’m guessing this has already been done. But these wikis can certainly serve as great memorials that will live on and as great learning tools.
On a second note, Michael, I’m really intrigued with the type of influence that a blog like this can exert. For example, your nice words about Spock can really give it an edge. (I guess that’s probably why you have full disclosure on this website.) I wonder if smaller blogs like my own need full disclosure?
It appears they just scraped imdb biography data for the inital set of results.. Stupid.
“wikipedia For People” – I Guess These Guys Didn’t Realize Wikipedia Already Has People.
Wow! This is SOME crappy implementation of a great idea. Shame.
There’s no reason Spock can’t launch. I think the “beta” is part of their marketing strategy. Spock — launch already!!
Sure, WikiYou looks alright, but I just don’t think there’s any way that anything could compete with Wikipedia.
-Chris
http://www.nerdcouncil.com
How is this different than http://www.fatdoor.com? Why have you not covered that startup on TechCrunch. They seem to be developing something more interesting and compelling than these two sites..
signed up and briefly tried it by setting up my own profile. totally not impressed with what it can do or how it looks. yuck…
There’s been a heated debate recently about the pros & cons (mainly cons) of WikiYou (http://brianhey...ure-in-wikiyou/)
For example, anyone can create your profile, which is that odd combination of weird and scary.
It is a shame, because WikiYou is in principle, a damn good idea.
This current implementation isn’t quite right and seems to play right into the hands of ident’ fraudsters…
Mike we appreciate the review on WikiYou. Though, I’m a little
disappointed that we were compared throughout the article to
Spock. First let me say, I’m a fan of Spock and what they’re doing. However, you did not give us much justice to compare WikiYou against Spock as we are two completely different businesses.
Spock is a search engine and we are a UGC content site. We are actually a source of content for Spock, as they aggregate content of people for search results. We are not attempting to become a search engine. WikiYou is about the unauthorized biographies of everyone. The content on a WikiYou profile will be generated (rather than scraped like Spock) by our community of users.
A better comparison would be to Wikipedia, as you began your article by stating: “generally speaking they are the Wikipedia for people”. This is a fair statement as we value the opinions and views of every person. Unlike Wikipedia, we believe there should be a biography for every person on earth, regardless if there have been “reliable” or “verifiable” sources of information for that person. Something Wikipedia will not allow, and without a source of information, Spock has nothing to scrape to create a profile.
Comparing WikiYou to Spock is like comparing YouTube to Blinkx.
wikiyou is propogating through SPAMMING. Whatever you do, DO NOT allow it to access your address book by providing it with any usernames or passwords to your account. All your contacts will get an email from wiki you, and you’ll get IRRATE emails from them.
Clicking the link in the SPAM mail it sends, tricks your friends into creating their own profiles.
Bastards. I’ll never visit again, and neither will all the people this effects.
If this site were added to with the idea of digital storytelling, this would be an excellent implementation of this idea. What about the idea of families and people who wish to leave their legacy? Would this be of use to them in another context? Also, there needs to be more added to this with the issue of storytelling and other ways of building a user base. One big concern I see are link building tactics as well as spam issues. I love the idea of this site but there needs to be more thought put into it. I will definitely be watching to see what happens with this site… =o)
iMarketingGuru, need you to come work for us at Story of My Life b/c that’s what we’re doing.
I really do not like where this is going. Maybe I have read this wrong but from the horses mouth we get “a biography for every person on earth, regardless if there have been “reliable” or “verifiable” sources of information for that person”… Regardless?.. So if you don’t want to be on there..tough?
So verifiable criminal history is OK?
The investment banker losses his career for not telling his bank he was convicted for doing weed when he was in college? Stole a car when your were a kid and now it appears as verifiable on this site??
Very, very sinister and will end in a massive lawsuit. I am a venture capitalist…wouldn’t touch it with a very large bargepole…. sorry guys.
Yep all techcrunch fans, we are launching a nearly similar service http://www.pomku.com But more focused on the other individual.
You need more informations : http://www.pomku.com/blog (what is pomku) http://www.pomku.com
I just found my personal information on this Spock Beta site and am extremely angry about this invasion of my privacy!!! I hope they get sued!
Not just personal information, but INCORRECT personal information – libel, in fact. I’m waiting for a Civil suit. SIgn me up.
I’ve informed Spock Beta of the libelous nature (three times) of the profile presented to no avail.
How much do I sue them for?