Social search site Wink released a new feature called People Search this weekend and I think it’s going to be a big move for the company. Wink People Search searches over the user profiles of MySpace, LinkedIn and Bebo. It’s not a mashup of the sites’ own search functions, it’s an original indexing of more than 100 million profiles over these three social networking sites.
Wink says it will be adding new social networks to People Search every two weeks, which ones will be voted on by registered Wink users. As niche social networks proliferate, an aggregated people search is so smart. Someone from the Open ID community should buy a big ad on the results page of Wink People Search.
The anonymous nature of many social networking sites makes it difficult, though not impossible, to use them to discover old friends. Wink says that the primary use for People Search will be finding people with similar interests across social networks. Results can be filtered by network, gender, age and single/taken status. Will young people want to search across networks by interest? I’m not sure. Will marketers and researchers? I imagine they will. How will these sites feel about Wink’s ads run against search results of their users’ profiles? That could be some concern, but short aggregated excerpts with links back are generally considered fair game to run ads against, I believe.
Without knowing how it will be used, People Search strikes me as just plain cool. It’s now integrated with the basic Wink bookmarking and sharing functions; Wink augments Google search by allowing you to search inside other users’ bookmark collections. Our previous coverage of Wink is here. The company raised $6.2 million in funding from Cambrian Ventures, Greylock Partners and angels last year. They tell us they’ve got a good, slow burn rate and that’s great – it allows them time to come up with and implement solid features like People Search. This sort of value proposition is likely to drive a significant number of people to Wink and thus increase the users of it’s basic social search. Social search probably isn’t desirable enough to stand on its own so it’s smart of Wink to start building things like People Search around it.
Update: Some people apparently find it distasteful to be able to search multiple social networks simultaneously. That makes no sense to me. If the need to go to multiple sites to search is the only obstacle between you and danger, you’re not very safe. I think this will have zero impact on nefarious activities and will make the biggest impact on research and perhaps evaluation of different social networks to see which are strongest in your areas of interest.
Kind of creepy! Who really cares of wink. So unkool!
Definitely a bit creepy — I’m a pretty big proponent of privacy and permission controls — can’t wait to see more services providing granular control over who sees our content.
So what? I just took 5 minutes and created my own social search using Google co-op:
http://google.c...5%3Au66c40virb8
Compare them. My results are just as good as Wink.
You can vote for the next social network to be added to wink here –
VOTE HERE.
I think it’s great that meta-social networking is finally arriving. It’s been a greatly discussed topic (in the form of PeopleAggregator and other projects). While Wink is a much more fleshed-out implementation, those who are interested in meta-social networking should check out Snag:
http://www.dapp...plications/Snag
It offers search across LinkedIn, MySpace, Friendster, Facebook, and Hi5. It also allows you to see your friends from all the networks, see your inboxes, and get status updates on your friends.
There’s a huge market for this, but Wink’s implementation still isn’t great. The key is to be able to link the various social networks together based on the information they have.
For instance a service that can figure out based on my LinkedIn Profile and my MySpace profile that it’s the same person, and then connect those two when searching, will make a huge splash. All of these searches are still meaningless if they can’t tie a single person to all of their online profiles.
I echo Hashim’s comment on using Google Co-op to produce such verticals in 1,2,3,4..5 minutes and decorating the presentation in few days.
So do I t need a Wink todo that?
More on my thohughts of valueless vertical search engines in this link http://smallpan...search-engines/
Hashim,
Just confirmed your pulling the same results as wink. Wow. I guess it’s “neat” in a sense…
Jon, any chance you’ll be at TechCrunch NYC? It’s rare we get a GOOD east coast event out here.
Dixon: if there is interest in Dapper at the TechCrunch event, we could be convinced to make it out there. Contact me via the Dapper website.
why aren’t they searching the mother of them all, http://www.zoominfo.com, are they being blocked out? and fyi, zoominfo is peoplesearch on yahoo and other sites already, though the social elements of wink are a nice touch (not sure how useful searching spam profiles on myspace will be, BUT it would be awesome if they had a ‘mark this myspace profile’ as spam utility from within wink for wink users, as in 3 bum votes or something to that effect)
watch this space… live long & prosper,
- dave mcclure
http://500hats.typepad.com/
unfortunately you can’t search for people by name on MySpace because that is data only known to them.
Dave, thanks for the tip! I have been playing with it and as someone who networks constantly, zoominfo is an incredible resource. Also, found this site for businesses that is linked from their homepage http://www.thezoomlist.com, but can’t find anything about it out there. Looks like they’re quietly moving outside of people.
Wink is just so easy to spam because they let people rate. For example, a search for “mortgage” results in just spam. When a search engine lets in results from obscure sites, and lets people rank, this is very hard to stop. For me, wink has no value because of this. I like sites such as http://www.tagjag.com and http://www.resultr.com better, although tagjag has more advertisments than results. Resultr.com has bad design, but is very handy since it lets me combine the search engines I trust.
I think Hasim’s coop search shows the flaw with Wink’s people search (which by the way isn’t side by side as useful as Wink. Wink at least let’s you limit by criteria). Keyword searching isn’t the way to go I think. There’s still a lot of noise in the results. I typed in “us soccer”, trying to find other US fans. I didn’t find any definitive results, at least I didn’t find what I was looking for. I found a lot of corporate myspace profiles and team pages (not people per se) and a few profiles with a passing mention of us soccer.
I know Wink has people following this thread…do any of you actually use this product? How? Can you give some concrete examples? Are you guys on here finding dates or tennis partners or what? I’m not sure how I’d use it, but I’d love to hear how you all do.
I wonder if Wink has a deal with MySpace since they are scraping some content. Are they going to run into the same problems singlestat.us and other MySpace-related sites have had?
i finally read your whole article and i think this is a smart idea.
Sounds like a good idea from Wink, the social search engine I use quite regularly (I try to use it whenever possible instead of Google). Sadly, I find that their results thus far aren’t that great (though adding google’s results was a great idea). Hopefully someday the quality will go up, but that might require hiring editors, etc.
Joel: “Keyword searching isn’t the way to go I think. There’s still a lot of noise in the results.”
I agree! What I would like is the ability for the search engine to act as a database search, so I can filter by name, interests, photos or whatever else.
A couple of things. I’ve been following Wink and here’s my perspective.
1. Wink is a social search engine. This means that it uses actual people to derive and influence relevancy. So the results are only as good as you let them be. If you’re searching for “mortgage” and you see “spam” then be a good boy and block it. If you see a good result, then you either tag it, wink it, or give it a thumbs up. It’s pretty simple. It’s very much like digg in this respect.
2. Google Co-op is nothing new. Rollyo, using Yahoo!’s API, has been around a long time. Then there’s Eurekster. The fact that google took so long to provide this kind of thing speaks volumes about their tendency to follow and not lead. Wake up people! Google isn’t freaking God. Stop drinking the Kool-Aid.
Bottom line, this is a good idea and apparently some of you can’t let it be just that. Use it. Be constructive, encourage and help Wink and others trying to do something different. That’s what Web 2.0 used to be about. That’s what it should be about.
If you are looking for an aggregated people search, I would have a look at Boston based Ziggs (www.ziggs.com). The service was launched in October 2004. According to their website -
“Ziggs offers a search platform for professionals for finding people in business online. By providing an Index dedicated to up-to-date business people profiles, Ziggs lets you search across more than 3 million public profiles from over 95,000 companies, and find the most accurate information on the people you seek. ”
I am in no way affiliated with Ziggs and simply wanted to let those reading this post know that the service exists.
What about the legal aspects involved in all of this. Since Myspace and the other networks do not currently provide an API, I am assuming that Wink is simply spidering these guys. If so, how long until they get blocked or totally shut down?
Why limit yourself to only 3 networks? Search 37 networks with my new project (built with Google Co-Op:
http://www.socialpeople.net
Here is a search for Mike Arrington of TechCrunch.
Torrie Wilson in a thong
http://torriewilson.cn.to
trish stratus topless
http://myblog.es/trish-stratus
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