Having a page put up about you in Wikipedia is difficult, mostly because of the Notability requirement for inclusion - and you aren’t “notable” unless you’ve received significant media coverage elsewhere. Other services have filled in the gap for the billion or so people online who can’t get onto Wikipedia - sites like LinkedIn, Wink and Spock (as well as most social networks, for the less professional profiles).

New Y Combinator startup Biographicon, founded by CEO Ethan Herdrick and CTO Daniel Terhorst, aims to fit itself somewhere in between Wikipedia and LinkedIn. Anyone can be included. And anyone can edit any page, like on Wikipedia. For now, that’s it. The founders say they’ll add more structure over time, and give dedicated places to add bio information (schools, work, etc). Here’s my page.

Biographicon will have a significant hurdle to overcome - until it gets traction people won’t for the most part bother entering in their information. But like all Y Combinator startups it’s used just a tiny amount of capital to get to launch. We’ll check back in in a couple of months and see how they’re doing.

• Sphere It
• 

New comer to the people search game 123people.com is a Austrian based startup that is looking to provide a new take on the competitive people search market with a European focus.

There’s no shortage of wannabes in this space. Spock, Wink, Zoominfo, WikiYou and PeekYou are a few companies we’ve reviewed previously. 123people.com joins that list, but there are a few differences that are worth mentioning.

123people.com is primarily a data aggregator, but unlike some of its competitors it goes one step further by aggregating publicly available phone numbers and email addresses for every search result. It’s not perfect, and it has better results for European focused searches, but this will improve with time.

In addition 123people also aggregates videos, photos, tags and comments from “hundreds of international sites” including Facebook, Hi5, Xing, YouTube, Last.fm and studiVZ. Users can claim, tag, vote and comment on aggregated profiles on 123people.com.

We have invites to the private beta of 123people.com to give away to TechCrunch readers. The first 150 people to email privatebeta@123people.com will get an invite code in return, and if you are one of the 150, let us know what you think of 123people.com in the comments.

• Sphere It
• 

As if the more than 20 billion Web pages out there aren’t enough, a new startup coming out of stealth mode today called Attendi has come up with a new twist on “people search.” This is not to be confused with the type of people search that Facebook is getting into (actually searching for people—see also Spock, Wink, Zoominfo, WikiYou and PeekYou), or the type of people-powered search results that Mahalo, Wikiasari, and others are exploring (also known as social search). Actually, Attendi could more aptly be called chat search because it wants to search what’s in people’s heads as expressed through online chats. Attendi is launching at DEMO fall.

Attendi is half a social network, and half a knowledge database. Here’s how it’s supposed to work. Members, known as “Attendis,” will create profiles on the site describing their areas of expertise, hobbies, and interests, as well as adding links to their blogs, social networks, or simply Websites they identify with. The site, which opens in beta today, dynamically creates tags that define what each person knows and cares about (they can also add their own tags). It is built on top of the Lucene open-source search engine, and the Jabber instant-messaging protocol.

When someone searches for a topic on Attendi, what comes back as results are profiles of other “Attendis” whose tags match the search request. And if they happen to be online at the moment, even on another IM system, the other person can initiate a chat discussion with one of them to ask questions about that topic. “Attendi will just be a way to broker your availability,” says CEO Drew Rayman. Every chat is archived, indexed, and becomes fodder for future search results.

Attendi is based in New York City, and Rayman is also the founder of an interactive ad agency called i33. He plans on selling search ad sponsorships based on Attendi topics, as well as a live chat ad unit that only pops up when a company’s online customer service rep is at the ready to do a hard sell through IM. It’s that kind of in-your-face advertising, though, that might drive people away from an IM-centric search engine and never give it a second chance.

Making topic-specific IMs searchable is certainly a novel way to create a knowledge database. But Attendi faces a huge hurdle in getting anybody to actually use its system. What’s the incentive? There is no existing network of super-smart Attendis anyone would want to tap into. One way around this chicken-and-egg problem, though, would be to take advantage of free advice that tens of thousands, if not millions, of people are already giving away for free online in the form of comments that people leave on blogs. There is no easy way to search across those. (Startups like Big Swerve, which was in the TechCrunch40 Demo Pit, are already onto this).

Bloggers today install search boxes from Google or Eurekster to allow readers to search through their posts. Why wouldn’t they also install a way to search comments if it were available. Attendi would be better off trying to build such a service to gain traction for its technology. It could offer a way to power comments for blogs that would make those comments searchable both on that blog alone and across all Attendi-powered blogs. That way, those people who leave their opinions across the blogosphere in the form of comments would surface in Attendi search results. Tapping into blog comments would be a great way to seed its knowledge network.

• Sphere It
• 

We’re not sure when it launched, but Fred Wilson has discovered that Seth Godin’s Squidoo has quietly entered the people search field with a new product called Squidwho.

Squidwho provides similar features to competitors including Wink, Spock, PeekYou, WikiYou and Zoominfo. Pages include a short biography, Amazon products (where applicable), YouTube videos, Flickr shots, latest news and RSS feed data from appropriate sites.

Each page is maintained my Squidoo Lens Guide and offers the same revenue share model as regular Squidoo pages offer.

It would be easy to question yet another company targeting people search in what continues to be a hot vertical (even Facebook is now offering public people search), and yet by labelling Squidoo Lens’ under the Squidwho label it’s a logical step for Squidoo. The backend is already in place as are the would-be guides to create the information; in effect the new service is more branding exercise than something completely new.

• Sphere It
• 

Facebook just announced that they are now allowing public searches of their users by people without Facebook accounts.

Not much information is included in the results (see image below)- just the name and primary photograph included in the user profile, and users can easily elect to stop search engines from indexing their information by changing their privacy settings.

As Om Malik notes, this is yet another competitive threat in the burgeoning people search scene. We’ve recently covered five new people search engines - Spock, Wink, Zoominfo, WikiYou and PeekYou. All of these services count on the fact that people information is distributed across many different websites and services.

To the extent any one service such as Facebook (or LinkedIn, etc.) gather lots of centralized information about a large group of people and then make it available for general search, these people search engines become much less important. If these startups were public entities, their market valuations would dip today.

• Sphere It
• 

PeekYou is a fairly new site that competes in a growingly crowded people search space.

The site offers the standard features we’ve come to expect from people focused search sites. A general user profile includes tags, which are divided into three categories (life, work and school) for context, web links including social network profiles, bio and picture.

PeekYou was founded by Michael Hussey, the creator of sites including RateMyTeachers.com which were later acquired to MTV. Hussey sees PeekYou as being “the ultimate reindexing of the web and a virtual people pages, spanning the entire web and assigning unique identities to individuals made up of everything from Social Networking pages, blog posts, news stories and known online aliases.” OK, so that is a handful, but he is at least aiming high. The site launched in July 2007.

PeekYou competes directly with Spock and in some respect with Wink as well (see our Spock coverage here, others here), so a direct comparison is called for. I like PeekYou in some ways more than Spock. It could be the aesthetics: PeekYou is much nicer to look at and seems to play more nicely as well in terms of editing, where as Spock may provide better links due to its higher user numbers, but it just doesn’t look nearly as nice. The data in PeekYou, at least for the couple of people I checked, also seems to be more accessible (for now). For example, comparing Michael Arrington on PeekYou and Spock (here and here) you get an immediate idea on what Michael is about in PeekYou, where as in Spock there may be more tags and relationships, but they are partially buried and not always immediately clear in terms of context. All up, Spock may be getting all the attention, but PeekYou does offer a decent alternative.

• Sphere It
• 

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.

• Sphere It
• 

It’s not often we hear about a startup’s venture financing before we see the product, but that is the case with yet-to-launch Spock, located in Silicon Valley. Rumors about their $7 million Series A round of financing from Clearstone Venture Partners and Opus Capital Ventures circulated last December, months before the beta service was planned to launch.

I met with founders Jaideep Singh (CEO) and Jay Bhatti (VP Product) last week to test the service, which they plan to beta launch next week.

People search is a space that went from nowhere to crowded, fast. Wink changed direction and launched a people search product last November. Also in this space is Streakr (yet to launch), ProfileLinker, LinkedIn, ZoomInfo and Upscoop.

Spock’s People Search Engine

Unlike the others (for the most part), Spock goes way beyond searching just social networks for people information. They are positioning themselves specifically against Google for web search and Amazon for product search, saying the third important type of search is information about people, and that 30% of Internet searches are people-related. Wink is Spock’s closest competitor among all of the ones listed above.

In my testing, Spock did a great job of finding information about different kinds of people - bloggers, celebrities, and even lesser known individuals with some web presence. See last screenshot below for an example search results page.

People Profiles and Metadata

But part of where Spock really shines is what they do after the search is completed. They are slowly indexing the entire web , which is no small feat, but focusing on important hubs of people information like blogs, wikipedia, photo sites and, of course, social networks. Each person discovered by their search engine is run through a process of de-duping (for people with identical or similar names) and given a permanent profile page (see screenshot of former President Bill Clinton’s profile to right - click for larger view). Spock auto-creates tags for individuals based on the information they find. Prominent tags for Bill Clinton, for example, include “former U.S. President, “Great Leader,” “Womanizer,” “Left Handed,” “Democrat,” and “Saxophonist,” among others. Spock also auto detects other relevant meta data about the individual - age, location and sex.

Users can add new tags and vote on whether existing tags are relevant or correct. Also, individuals can claim their own profile (Spock runs your email through the social networks to see if it is attached to the right profile). Once claimed, that user has additional voting weight with his or her own tags and description. It will be interesting to see prominent individuals fighting the masses as they try to dominate their own identity, and lawsuits will inevitably surface as well.

People Relationships

Spock also finds relationships between people based on an analysis of information obtained in their web index, and based on user added data later on. When looking at a person’s profile, there will be links to others that Spock thinks are related.

Matt Mashall got a very early look at the product last year. See his notes here to see how it has changed since then.

Screenshots (click for larger view):

• Sphere It
• 

Search engine startup Wink has offered to buy back stock from investors with remaining cash at a rate of fifty cents on the dollar, according to sources involved with the company.

The company has raised two rounds of financing totaling $7 million to date. Our understanding is that some of the investors have elected to sell their stock back to the company under these terms. Wink’s main investor, Greylock, reduced it’s stake in the company but remains its largest outside shareholder.

Wink’s plan will be to consolidate it’s remaining cash and focus on its people search engine, launched last fall.

We’re hearing two versions of why this is happening. The first version, coming from disgruntled shareholders, is that the company has failed to execute and it’s time to return what’s left of the capital to investors. The other story, being pushed by the company, is that they simply made a strategic decision to change the direction of the product, and offered investors a way out since it isn’t the story they originally bought into. Both are probably partially true, although it’s clear that a liquidation couldn’t be forced unless Greylock was behind it. And Greylock, even though they’ve sold some of their stock, still seems to be backing the company.

Odeo was also recently bought back from investors. In that case, the company was taken completely private and outside shareholders were reimbursed 100% of their initial investment. That looks to be a brilliant decision by founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone. While Odeo has since been put up for sale, Twitter has exploded with growth and has hyper buzz.

Will Wink also be successful? That’s for users to decide. But organizing the mess of human meta data included in the big social networks could be a smart way to go.

• Sphere It
• 

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.

• Sphere It
•