Facebook search done right
Ark
http://ark.com/
One of the finalists of TechCrunch Disrupt 2012, Ark is hailed as the solution to the people discovery problem, or rather the people search engine. Ark integrates with Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Orkut, RenRen, and others culminating in 1Bn+ profiles. The main UI is simply an advanced search filter on the left and the search results in the center where clicking on results will direct you to view the profile.
First off, this is scary with its privacy implications. I know that all this information is already public and thus they are only scouring what is already viewable, but it is scary to see exactly how much is available and open. Ark does state that they take privacy seriously and really separate what is publicly available and what is private or requires existing connections to view (ie. if you link your Facebook account, your friends' profiles will be more complete). Hopefully this kind of service will shock people enough to take their privacy controls seriously and really control what is being disclosed. So, yes, the responsibility is more on the individual users and Ark is not to blame for what is public, and Ark is only making it apparent just how much people are sharing.
One of the Disrupt panel members asked the best question that is this not simply Facebook search done right? Currently Ark is reliant mostly on Facebook for its information though it claims that other sources are also being used and that certain types of information are more reliable on specific sources, like job information from LinkedIn. But truly, at this point, looking at the UI and the information being returned, it does appear to be only an advanced search functionality layered on top of Facebook. That explains why there are rumors that Facebook had approached Ark earlier on to potentially acquire or hire the founders, since Facebook's search functionality is rudimentary and limited.
The true difficulty going forward is data mapping. How is Ark addressing the problem of matching the user accounts of one individual across the various social networks used? How will they know to link my Facebook, LinkedIn, Meetup, etc accounts all together? My suspicion is that they don't at this point. There is no universal identifier between accounts that is available for them to use in mapping user accounts. That is why it currently feels more like a Facebook search because Facebook remains its main source and additional information is not really integrated into one profile yet. I assume that as more and more people use this service and they explicitly link various accounts to their profile, Ark will then note these account links to improve their profile aggregation.
The question then is how useful is it really now if accounts are not being linked? It still is of use since Facebook's people search is so terrible. The problem of how to find all your friends that currently live in New York City is a chore in Facebook while it is a simple act on Ark. But don't expect to be able to do some really interesting discovery across multiple sources just yet. I doubt you'd be able to search for who has Php/Solr skills (from LinkedIn), went to school at a top tier school (from Facebook), currently living in New York City (from either source). But regardless, being able to search per topic on a single source is pretty useful already.
The interesting question that Ark fumbled on is probably one of the most important- monetization strategy. There are inherent problems of how to generate money from a people search. Ads are the generic go-to and can be targeted based on the search criteria being used. But what other avenues are available? There of course are metrics that can be crunched, but what will those be and who would they be valuable for? Because there is no company/brand presence in a pure people search, I am not sure what kind of information vendors and companies would be interested in purchasing. This is a big problem that Ark faces.
A bigger risk is what happens if Facebook, LinkedIn and each of these social networks decide to improve their latent people search and include better advanced search filters? That would greatly threaten the future of Ark, because I am skeptical of how well they map profiles across content source right now.
Also, the architecture of Ark is currently heavily reliant on the APIs of their partnered social networks. All those advanced queries are being run and answered on the servers of each content source, so Facebook is paying for the answering of the queries. Ark is simply just translating the search criteria into an API call that Facebook can understand.
Holy Ark?
People search done right. Pulls information from Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Orkut, RenRen and many other social networks.
Currently feels more like advanced search layer on top of Facebook API because most results are single-source and Facebook being that source.
Main problem is how to map user accounts across networks and thus have a single comprehensive profile to query against. And data mapping also gets scary since it allows people to really track user activity across the entire internet especially if they can link users with Google Plus accounts that already follow user activity across multiple services.
Privacy concerns. Not Ark's fault that so much personal information is being freely shared by users. Ark does clearly specify what information is publicly available and what is getting pulled because of user connection to the subjects. Hopefully Ark results will make users pause and consider privacy controls on each network they use.
Money money money. Ark is faced with a serious problem of how to monetize this product. It is difficult to rely on ads for a pure people search since users are not looking for products or services but individuals.
Risk of becoming obsolete as social networks improve their own search functionality. Ark may want to pre-empt that by offering advance search solutions to each of the networks.
No doubt this is an interesting product and the implications of this is huge. They are trying to break down the silos of user data that each of the social networks have and to really map user accounts across content source. We shall have to wait and see how successful they will be at addressing this main difficulty of account mapping.










