MyBlogLog, a blogger social network acquired by Yahoo about a year ago, launched v.2 of their service tonight, with a significant new feature. You can see the MyBlogLog widget in the right sidebar of this site – it shows pictures and names of recent visitors.

The new feature is an activity stream of recent activities by all users on various social networks – blog posts, new photos, bookmarks on Delicious, Facebook updates, Twitter updates, etc. The image shows the new profile page – mine is here, and I’ve added a summary widget below.

If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the startup feature du jour. Facebook first popularized the news feed in late 2006. Later others took the idea and opened it up, creating a news feed around activities on a variety of social networks. FriendFeed is the most popular, and recently raised a $5 million round of financing. Plaxo, Soup.io, Iminta, Spokeo, ProfileLinker, MyLifeBrand, Fuser, 30Boxes, Mugshot, Readr and Second Brain all have variations. Party planning site MyPunchbowl recently released its version. And now, Facebook is planning to open up their NewsFeed and allow users to add other services as well.

Yeah, I know. That’s way too many similar services to test out. If you’re a casual observer and just want to try out one service, go with FriendFeed (my account is here). People are flocking there, and starting to use it as a hub to leave comments and other content. If you’re already a Plaxo user, their Pulse product is just as good. Facebook isn’t open enough yet to really be called a competitor.

The new MyBlogLog features are a great addition to the product, but it’s not innovative enough to make a big impact. They do have a large community of loyal bloggers using their service, however (including me), and I’ll certainly keep an eye on the activity streams of the people I follow there.

Jason Calacanis has announced an expansion to the Mahalo social platfrom that allows users to access most major social networking sites within Mahalo itself.

The idea of social networking site aggregation or single landing page isn’t new, we’ve covered startups aiming to provide a similar service, such as MyLifeBrand, ProfileLinker and Loopster, but none have really captured the imagination of the broader internet. Mahalo is trying to better these services by becoming the front page destination for those looking to access sites such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube and others.

Setup is easy enough. You simply add your user name or user ID into the boxes provided, and it then pulls your profiles from each service. It’s not perfect yet, for example you have to provide your full URL for Facebook (which they noted) and LinkedIn (which they didn’t note). From there you can visit each page via tabs on Mahalo itself. I found that maybe half of the pages I opened remembered my ID and I had immediate access to use the sites, others didn’t at first, but after logging in work fine.

I wont fully revisit the whole is Mahalo a great service debate here other than to say that someone once described Mahalo to me as search for the mentally challenged (well he used another word, use your imagination). I’ve always thought that was a little unfair, it’s perhaps search for the Google and/ or Boolean illiterate (so I’m not the target market), but there is value there for the general consumer market. I’m not about to switch to using Mahalo for search tomorrow and I’d expect most of you reading this wont, but ignore the search and take a look at Mahalo Multiprofiles.

It’s well implemented, handy, and its something I can see myself using. We still aren’t at the ultimate point of proper social networking aggregation yet (see Google Socialstream for how it will eventually work) but in the mean time Mahalo Multiprofiles may well find favor among the many who struggle to keep up with their ever growing number of social network sites.

On a related note, I cant help that wonder exactly in which direction Mahalo is heading. Mahalo offers a social networking platform that now does aggregation, and on the search side it’s starting to look more and more like Weblogs Inc than a search engine, check out the Celebrity Gossip pages as an example: that’s not search results, that looks and smells like content generation to me. Calacanis has always been good a building multiple traffic streams so it’s probably part of that strategy, but at the current rate Mahalo wont primarily be a search tool by the end of 2008.

What we’ve called Y Combinator’s European clone, Y Europe, has let loose with their first startup, Soup.io.

Soup.io is very low friction take on life streaming that serves as an aggregator for a lot of your public social media feeds. There are a lot of startups trying to do social aggregation (Spokeo, ProfileLinker, MyLifeBrand, Fuser). Paul Buchheit’s highly automated FriendFeed looks like one of the best so far, but Soup.io is another easy to use alternative despite being manual.

Without needing to sign up, you can easily combine feeds from services like: Flickr, Digg, LiveJournal, Delicious, eBay, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Vox, YouTube, Zoomr, or any other RSS feed. Soup.io also has a bookmarklet that lets users easily add content to their feed from around the web, turning it into kind of a tumble blog. All the feeds are displayed in dated order on a customizable profile page. Signing up means you can connect with friends, follow their feeds, and link your feed to your own domain name.

Each of these “life streaming” services is applying the news feed paradigm to the web, but not wrapped in the same sense of place and purpose as Facebook’s social network. Most life streaming services are just really simple RSS readers or replace a bunch of social networks with another somewhat clunky meta one. However, as social sites open up their information, services like Soup will benefit and the real question will change from how to aggregate your content, to what really interesting services you can run on top of them.

I moderated a fascinating panel tonight at Google headquarters that included execs from three “people search engines” – the CEO of Wink (Michael Tanne), the CEO of Spock (Jaideep Singh), and the COO of Zoominfo (Bryan Burdick).

The panel was very timely. Earlier today the Wall Street Journal published an article called “You’re Nobody Unless Your Name Googles Well” that outlined the exact problem these search engines are trying to solve – finding information about people on the web, many of whom have identical names. The article didn’t mention the efforts of these startups, instead focusing entirely on Google, but it did note a few interesting statistics. There are, for example, 158 million results on Google for the name “John Smith” (I actually see 225 million, but who’s counting).

Big statistics are thrown around when people talk about people search. Singh says around 30% of searches are people-related. Tanne says 2 billion searches per month are on people (Facebook data tends to suggest this is probably vastly underestimated).

Still, it’s not clear that this market is huge. The big advertising dollars tend to come in for product and service-related searches, not for searches on John Smith.

Spock, Wink and Zoominfo each have very different products, reflecting their different philosophies on business models, target markets, and control over information.

Wink

Wink changed course in November 2006 and began providing search results on people from social networks like MySpace, LinkedIn and Bebo. Users search based on name, geography and other criteria (company, school, whatever) and see results from major social networks. Tanne says they now have over 175 million distinct individuals indexed on their site.

Users can claim their Wink profile, proving their ownership of various profiles on social networks by entering in the email they use for those accounts.

Wink relies on advertising for revenue, and Tanne says they can get $2 or so in revenue per thousand page impressions. He also hinted at other revenue streams down the road, such as lead generation for other services.

Wink raised $7 million in venture capital but did a partial stock buy-back earlier this year.

Spock

Spock hasn’t launched yet, but the demos we’ve seen show it to be a direct competitor to Wink. The company, which raised $7 million in a Series A round of financing, is in private beta and should launch in the next couple of months.

See our overview for a more complete description of the service. Spock is an ambitious effort – Singh says they will index the entire web to search for people-related data, although for now they are focusing on high payoff sites like Wikipedia.

Once data is found, Spock analyzes it to de-dupe others with the same or similar name and then creates a user profile for the individual. Tags are created dynamically and relationships with other individuals are noted. Readers can then add additional tags or vote the existing ones up or down. An individual can also claim their own profile by proving their identity, and get enhanced voting power on their descriptive tags.

Like Wink, Spock is focused on generating advertising revenue.

Spock will generate a lot of controversy because individuals are not in complete control of their profile. The community decides on descriptive tags for a person, so Bill Clinton’s profile includes such terms as “sex scandal” and “impeached United States Official.” Litigation is sure to follow from celebrity types not happy with their Spock profile, but Singh said flat out tonight that the site will firmly fight any attempts to defy the community’s decisions on descriptive tags. I’m betting there are one or two legal precedents out there on this, perhaps involving Wikipedia disputes.

Spock also has a vertical logo, which is totally cool.

Zoominfo

Zoominfo was the black sheep of the group. They were founded long ago, in 2000, making them a great grandfather by Internet startup standards. They are well into their revenue phase with $12 in sales last year, and are profitable.

The service is completely business focused (it’s more of a competitor to LinkedIn than Wink or Spock) and pulls data from press releases and corporate bios on websites. A lot of data is free, but certain searches require a subscription that starts at $100/month. They’ve recently updated their site with a more contemporary design, but their business model of keeping data behind a paywall is very web 1.0 (hey, they’re profitable though).

Who’s Best?

Zoominfo is a solid business, but elicited little enthusiasm from the attendees at the panel this evening. Press release quotes and corporate bios just don’t get these Silicon Valley types fired up. Spock is yet to launch and has the benefit of controlling its messaging and user experience for the time being. Controversy sells, and the first few profile disputes are sure to bring lots of traffic to the site. But until it launches there’s just no way to effectively judge it. Wink is a solid search engine but people are still digesting the “bad” news of its product shift away from more traditional search and it’s stockholder buyout.

There are many others playing in this sandbox too, such as Streakr , ProfileLinker, LinkedIn and Upscoop. Many of these overlap a lot with Wink, but less so with Spock. As I mentioned above, it’s also not clear just how big this people search “sand box” really is.

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.

There are clearly too many social networks, and if you belong to one you likely belong to many. Boston based (soon to be relocated to San Francisco) ProfileLinker’s aim is to help you stay organized across those networks. Like Meebo did with instant messaging, ProfileLinker wants to aggregate your social networking experience.

The target user is someone with a profile on at least two networks – MySpace and Facebook, for example. You tell ProfileLinker your site credentials and it pulls your bio, friends and other information from those sites and centralizes it. You then use ProfileLinker to manage your activity on those networks: aggregate and manage multiple social profiles; discover new social networks and communities of interest within social networks; and receive notification of messages and friend requests from multiple networks.

The company is also launching a number of widgets that will pull data from all of your social networks and allow you to present it on another website. The first widget will be a “portable profile” with links to your various networks.

This differs from PeopleAggregator (our coverage), which has actually created software for customers to create their own social networks. ProfileLinker is trying to aggregate your data from existing networks and make it more useful.

To do this they’ll need to keep those networks happy, while taking some page views from them. They have one partnership sealed already, with Photobucket, and hope to do more. But for sites where they are unable to get a partnership they’ll have to gather information using the user’s credentials. There’s a risk that networks will simply cut them off.

The company is currently closing an angel round of financing. They are in private beta – sign up on the home page for an invitation.

Screen. shots of the current version are below.