Streakr Search Makes Social Networks Bare All
Nick Gonzalez
21 comments »
Vivek, over at Startup Squad, recently discovered a new social network and social networking meta search engine, Streakr. The main URL still says the site is coming soon. The new engine lets you search the profiles on the major networks (MySpace, Hi5, Bebo, and Facebook) as well at it’s own social network. It appears to be a hook to draw people into their main service, like Wink did when they launched their own profile search and Rapleaf had with UpScoop. Profile management tool ProfileLinker also has a search engine.
Streakr’s social network is like Delicious for cool kids and is a less flashy take on Trig. It includes a profiles, a toolbar, and a stumble upon feature that lets you flip through links in a given category. Here’s the one for video.
The profiles look a lot like MySpace, consisting of the usual details, about me, photos, and seizure inducing layouts. Xenia is Streakrs’ Tom. However, where MySpace puts a blog and comments, Streakr puts in favorite links and your “thumbs up” rating for each. You can input the links into your profile manually, or use the Streakr toolbar to add links to your profile and vote on them. The toolbar also provides an interface to all the other functionality on the main site, and is currently only for IE, requires the .NET framework, and takes forever and a day to download and install.
There are a couple other sites with social networking meta search. Here’s the lowdown on a few:
Wink
Wink is fast and simple. It searches Friendster, MySpace, Bebo, LinkedIn, and Live Spaces. It also has advanced search features, like location, sex, status, age, and interests. It also lets you narrow your search by those fields after your first search.
ProfileLinker
ProfileLinker is the most comprehensive search engine, with 84 social networking sites including general, blog, cultural, dating, professional, student, and special interest networks. Unfortunately you have to log in to use it.
UpScoop
UpScoop comes ahead in ease of use. Unlike the others, UpScoop searches by email based on all the contacts in your address book. It searches Bebo, Classmates, Ecademy, Flickr, Friendster, Hi5, Livejournal, Multiply, MySpace, Ringo, Tickle, Tribe, Yelp, Mog, and LinkedIn. While it finds the vast majority of your friends off the bat, some drawbacks are that it can take UpScoop up to a couple hours to search for the last few and the need to hand over your email credentials.
Very nice design…and I like the strategy of using the more established sites as bait. If they can equal or better the experience I think they will do well.
am I too old ? I just don’t get it … they host a bunch of sites from different categories in iframes, whoopee
I think youtubesearcher is talking about the “stumble upon” like part. I tried it out. It looks kinda fresh compared to Myspace, even thought they have a lot in common. I personally like the “favorite link” section, since I can use this to get more traffic to my site.
I’ll play with it the next couple of days and then write my experience in my blog.
I think spacecatch does something very similar to this. They also have a faceted meta data search for myspace profiles. Again, nothing new
it’s = it is != its
I dont get this space. Is People search really so hot!! Most people dont even reveal their real names on these networks??
Anyway, I dont see these as businesses. How big is the market - how many page views can you get. Also, its an upstream issue, right. If these players start monetizing the search traffic and keeping the users on their site instead of sending them to Bebo, MySpace, etc. I am sure the social networks are going to be pissed about it….. hmmm…
Grammar Police
WTF is != ?
I think the IE requirement for the toolbar is not going to do them any good. They should have designed it to be browser independent.
Stalkerati.com - the problem is the myspace search stop working tho.
I still think The Internet Address Book is the best people searcher, with their ‘live search technology’ they perform a search on over 30 social networks including MySpace, Hi5, Frienster, Flickr, ICQ and many more. The results are more accurate since it’s a direct request to the service. The Internet Address Book
Nag - thanks, I had forgotten 1videoconference. I added them to the post. DimDim is also open source. http://www.dvdcdconverter.com
Looks really slick, I’ve just downloaded the toolbar, I’m gonna get no work done…online games section rocks.
This site has a good design and is aesthetically pleasing. I’ve been playing around with it and it’s easy to use. No site launches with all their functionality, I’m interested to see what Streakr adds to this site in the coming months. Worth trying now and one to watch closely.
All of these search engines = tools for stalking. I’m especially surprised that Facebook would be listed as one of the social networking sites searched by these engines. It’s a private network - how would you find a profile through the search? Profiles are only accessable if you are logged in AND in the same network as the person whose profile you’d like to view. So, how does that work?
… and there’s another entrant in this space coming soon.
Niche meta-search is cool, but if you want to track someone online I prefer a simpler approach, try the “stalker” page I created at: http://www.srchr.com/?PageID=17127
Add new social networks by typing the domain name into the box on the top left. Then share your own custom page without logging in.
Also works beyond social networks….shopping, jobs, whatever. I find this platform makes a lot more sense…
You shouldn’t need Vivek Puri’s reminder of this, do you, Nick? Mike Arrington had reviewed this way back when all the Streakr team can put up is just a Wordpress blog: http://www.techcrunch.com/2006.....amagotchi/
You missed one: http://www.stalkerati.com