The website for Reunion.com already redirects to MyLife.com, while dedicated people search engine Wink still has its own web presence. MyLife, however, already integrates Wink’s technology, which means the new hybrid social platform is now a full-fledged search engine which not only finds people—thanks to aggregated search across social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace—but also helps visitors connect with them all on the same site. On its company presentation page, MyLife boasts that it can locate over 750 million online profiles via its search index today.

Reunion.com has been getting decent traffic lately, rising to 15.4 million U.S. unique visitors and 18.2 million worldwide last month, according to comScore. Google Trends also paints a picture of continued growth, albeit almost exclusively for North America. That basically means MyLife is now effectively the fourth largest social network in the U.S. after Facebook, MySpace and Classmates.com, leaving behind a bunch of more talked-about companies like Bebo, LinkedIn, Digg and Imeem, if you compare comScore data for January 2009.

According to Founder and CEO Jeffrey Tinsley, Reunion grew 92% last year and its revenues for 2008 was somewhere in the vicinity of $52 million. Up until now, the company has raised $26.4 million in venture capital over two rounds, and it has used $6 million of this capital to acquire five companies to date (Wink, GoodContacts, MyAddressBook, Planet Alumni, and HighSchoolAlumni.com).

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Going by ComScore’s December numbers, Pipl is leading in the US with 557K unique users to Spock’s 260K, but is trailing internationally with 1.35M uniques to Spock’s 2.38M. How has Pipl pulled this off? Matthew Hertz, the company CEO, tells me it’s mostly word-of-mouth. It’s a simple answer but it rings true. Just take it out for a spin and you’ll see why—it’s just good. In fact it’s so good it’ll probably scare some people’s pants off when they see what information it is able to—legally—drudge up.

It produces not only links to all of your profiles on social networks like Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn, blog mentions, and photos on Flickr. It finds mentions of your name in public records, including property records, SEC filings, and birth databases. It also finds e-mail addresses and summarizes “quick facts” about the person. For instance, a search for “Roi Carthy” turns up quick facts like these:

Roi Carthy is an Israeli-based entrepreneur and startup consultant…
Editor’s note: Roi Carthy is currently writing for TechCrunch…

Unlike most search engines, Pipl crawls the Deep Web. I’ll explain.  A general purpose search engine typically crawls the Web by following links to URLs found in other pages. By contrast, the Deep Web is made up of pages that no other pages link to. Dynamic pages are a good example of these sorts of pages. This means that if an engine wants to index pages located in Deep Web repositories it has to “guess” possible URLs. Just how big is the Deep Web? No one really knows but it’s generally accepted that it is vastly greater (orders of magnitude greater) than the Surface Web—the pages which are easily indexed by search engines.

The folks at Pipl were hesitant to discuss their “secret sauce” with me, so their explanations were on the vague side but here it is in broad strokes: First, Pipl’s crawlers hunt out Deep Web sources and URLs. Special algorithms they developed then perform the “guesswork” of possible inputs. The ensuing pages are then parsed for various types of data and images (Pipl even augments with meta data that appears elsewhere). Finally, using advanced language analysis and ranking, Pipl floats the most relevant portions of information about an individual. Remember, all of this is very tricky because in the Deep Web there is no real way to rate a web page based on its importance, for the simple fact that no other page is linking to it.

Obviously, Pipl is designed for people search by name, but it also just debuted the ability to search emails, usernames and by reverse phone number lookup. The results page is designed as a “one page report” that categorizes information in an easy to read manner. Results are displayed based on accuracy, relevance and importance, particularly useful for results for common names (”John Smith”).

Pipl’s business model is pretty straight forward: Sponsored links and results, all in the form of text ads, displayed on the results pages—there are no banners, keeping the look and feel clean. Most if not all ads are linked to background-report providers, which are far more relevant to US users than the international ones, but hey, revenue is revenue.

So next time you want to search for your former high school sweetheart or a long lost relative, try Pipl, it seems like the best place to start.

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People-search engine Wink has joined forces with Reunion.com, a hybrid people-search/social networking site, to create one giant hub for finding people you once knew but forgot to keep in touch with. The two companies have merged and will be launching a new website (and brandname) in early 2009, which the sites say will feature a total of 700 million user profiles.

Wink allows users to simultaneously search for profiles across social networks including MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, and a number of others. The site originally launched in 2005 as a people-powered search engine, and reinvented itself as a people search in 2006. In September the site reported a search index of over 500 million user profiles, though some of these seem to lead to profile pages that either don’t work or are blank.

Reunion.com combines the elements of people search with a social network. The site, which raised $25 million last year, allows users to quickly join the network by entering basic contact information, and then charges for more advanced (and snoopy) features. Premium accounts allow users to see who has searched for their profiles, and have become popular enough that the site operates at a profit and claims 50 million registered members.

The two companies have a history together, as Reunion and Wink forged a “multi-year, multi-million dollar agreement” in 2007 giving Reunion members access to Wink’s people search.

There’s a definite need for social network profile aggregators, especially as users find their online identities scattered across multiple social networks and blogs. But if the Wink/Reunion hybrid is going to become a mainstream search engine (a “Google for people search”), it badly needs to focus on the accuracy of its results. Hundreds of millions of profiles may sound like a lot, but when many of them are virtually useless the numbers really don’t mean much.

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Wink, the search engine that lets you search user profiles across many social networks, has announced that it has indexed a whopping 500 million profiles worldwide – double the number it had twelve months ago. Wink also predicts similar growth in the future, with a projected 1 billion profiles indexed over the next year.

Wink originally launched back in 2005 as a user-enhanced search engine that asked the crowd to help tag and rank search results. The site transitioned to a search engine for people in fall 2006 and went on to partially liquidate, explaining that the company’s new direction was not what investors had originally signed up for.

The site now allows users to search for someone’s online presence across a variety of social networks, including MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Bebo, Friendster, and a number of others. Information available for each profile depends on the privacy settings on each network, but generally includes at least links to their profiles along with a photo to make sure you’ve found the right person.

The milestone is significant, assuming the majority of the profiles represent legitimate people and aren’t simply names with no associated information. But while the growing repository of profile data may prove useful, the site has adopted some irritating advertising and affiliate schemes – for example, results often include links to profiles on PeopleFinders, which are only visible after becoming a paying member of the site.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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):

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Here’s the basics on Wink. It’s a search engine that indexes tagged content from Digg, Yahoo MyWeb, Furl, Slashdot, other social bookmarking services and it’s own users’ archives. Those items are displayed as appropriate on search results pages above results from Google. It’s Google, augmented by peoples’ tags. It’s also a standard social bookmarking service in and of itself.

Users can also create collections, or lists of items related to a given topic, a list of pages related to buying a video projector or a list of pages related to the band Weezer. Lists can be subscribed to by other users. Unlike standard tags in typical social bookmarking services, any given list can be added to by another user.

All of that could read like standard rhetoric, but it can be interesting to use the FireFox search plug-in and add tag search to the top of your Google results. If you’re looking for a simple, straightforward social bookmarking service this could work for you. Wink also synchs with del.icio.us and lets users change wiki entries inside Wink that were gleaned from Wikipedia.

The company received $6.2 million in funding from Cambrian Ventures, Greylock Partners and angels last year. You can see our previous coverage of Wink here.

What’s new in Wink 2.0? Users will be able to move search results up and down by vote, including results from Google. The current version of Wink just ranks sites by the number of Wink users who have tagged them. Quick voting could help increase the quality of the results or it could substitute carefully thought out algorithms with the whims of fickle users. It’s a delicate balance, but Wink says for example that spam control will be implemented shortly to prevent antisocial users from gaming the system. The single item that’s received the most thumbs up on that query will be displayed at the top of the page.

Collections built by users will play a much more prominent roll in search results as well. While the current version only displays collections with titles that match search terms, the new version will index the full text of the pages included in the collection, tags and user ratings in order to display the most high quality collections by relevance. Users will also be able to subscribe to future additions made to collections.

Toolbar lovers rejoice – there will be a FireFox toolbar available for Wink next week as well, so you can perform all the site’s functions from any page.

Finally, the garish colors that make the current site so hard on the eyes will be gone in favor of a more appealing user interface. Unfortunately the new logo is annoying, I think.

That’s the information I could get out of the company prior to launch of the new site. There should be more, as the above looks to me like little beyond news that the site is living up to its stated goals better than before. Even that is good news though, as Wink search is something I’ve wanted to use for some time but have found unsatisfying in action to date.

Wink 2.0 will go up early next week, but you can visit the site and provide your email if you’d like to be notified when it’s available.

Wink has evolved substantially since my October 12, 2005 review.

Wink is, at its core, a combination of traditional search with feature-rich social bookmarking. Bookmarked/tagged results appear above normal search.

Search results can be bookmarked, tagged and rated from Wink. The same functionality is available via a bookmarklet that works with Firefox, Safari and IE. As a twist, users can also block “bad” pages. Lots of functional Ajax is built into the interface.

Users can easily browse tag results (either their own, or all users).

There are three key additional features.

First, Wink has added two way synchronization with del.icio.us bookmarks. And they’ve added a “Keep Sync’d” feature that, as the name implies, maintains a constant one or two-way syncronization with del.icio.us. No word on whether they will add in other social bookmarking services over time or not.

Second, Wink allows the creation of “collections”, which is a tag group (tags of tags). Collections are controlled by one user but can be shared with anyone.

Third, and this feature really appeals to me, Wink has added a “Wink Answers” tab to search results. The text is a wiki – meaning anyone can edit it. For queries that have complicated results, a number of options appear. A lot of data has been pre-populated, and I believe this will be a popular feature. Like Wikipedia, it begs for user interaction, but with a lower intimidation factor.

Wink is also finalizing a nice blog widget that includes additional links (that point only to bookmarks created by the blogger). See here for an example. I have not had the opportunity to test this myself yet, but it looks interesting.

Congratulations to Founder Michael Tanne and the entire Wink team.

Unlike Wink, which allows users to add significant metadata to bookmarked pages (tags and reviews), Jookster determines relevance of bookmarked queries solely based on a keyword analysis of content on the bookmarked page.

Any web page may be bookmarked, or “Jooked” by users. No additional metadata is requested at the time of bookmarking. These results are shows above normal search results on Jooked.

A key part of the service is associating with friends. When you perform a search, you have the option of determining who’s bookmarks are also included – just you, friends of friends, one more level out, etc.

The Jookster idea is great, but the lack of metadata associated with the bookmarks (particularly tags) means it will not return results nearly as relevant as Wink results. I also question whether users will have any real incentive to give up browser real estate to yet another bookmarklet, and bookmark pages.

John Cook also writes about Jookster today.

We profiled Wink on October 12, 2005 and Michael Tanne, the CEO, gave a demo at our party last week. Wink was also one of the sponsors of our party.

Wink is in private beta right now and are dripping in new users a few at a time to test the service. Thousands of people have been waiting weeks to get in.

As part of their sponsorship of our party, Wink has agreed to guarantee immediate access to the first 100 people who request a beta account at Wink and write “techcruncher” in the note section. This process is automated – if you don’t receive an immediate invitation you either misspelled “techcruncher” or 100 people have already requested an invite with the code. If you aren’t one of the first 100, they will still make an effort to get you to the top of the list.

Michael has requested that I stress that beta testers should be willing to spend some time helping them build out the service. You can do that by tagging results, syncing with your del.icio.us tags, creating search sets and, generally, performing a lot of searches.

Wink gave a brief demo at at Web2.0 last week and we were immediately hooked. Wink is still in private beta (you can request an account on their home page), but I’ve had a chance to talk with CEO Michael Tanne and I’ve been using it all week.

At its core Wink is a search engine, and they’ve intelligently layered in shared user participation to give fresh, meaningful results that, Wink argues, can’t be found anywhere else. The key user participation features are tagging, rating and sharing.

Our goal at Wink is to combine search with user participation to give you fresher, more accurate, spam-free search. You can create tags, rate results and keep track of sites you’ve visited. You can create Search Sets of tags that show your expertise in a subject, and you can make those publicly available to be shared with other people. Wink also has concepts that are created and updated by users like you, so feel free to edit existing concepts, or even write your own!

Because Wink is “people-powered”, it will only get better when people tag, rate, and share. So please make Wink your default search engine, use it everyday, and let us know how you like it. And if you help us out by contributing or giving us feedback, we’ll give you some invitations of your own to send out!

Core search results are provided by Google and wikipedia. A search query returns those results, which you can tag and rate from 0-5 stars. A zero rating help to block out spam and other bad content, eventually removing it from the index altogether.

This user-created metadata (when aggregated) helps Wink return more relevant results to the entire community. Wink has taken del.icio.us bookmark data to fill out their results with rich tagging content right from the start.

For future queries, tagged/rated results appear above normal search results.

Also within search results is an area where Wink users are listed that have tagged results with the query used. Clicking on any user takes you to a page that shows all of their public tags and ratings. If you find that you like a user’s tags and ratings, you can subscribe to those results via RSS.

There are a ton of other features as well that I am discovering as I use the service. For instance, you can create a “search set” (it reminds me of Rollyo) that combines links to favorite sites along with tags.

As a side note, people are realizing that user-generated metadata may be the key to improving search results. Google has taken early steps in this direction with their early bookmarking product. In our profile yesterday, one of the comments opined that Google may be experimenting in this area. Perfect timing for Wink!

Zvents

My friend Ethan Stock showed off Zvents, which launched last night. We’ve written about zvents here and here. In a nutshell, Zvents helps you create and locate the tens of thousands of monthly local events and has tons of awesome ajax, tagging and other web2.0 stuff.

KnowNow

Ron Rasmussen talked about KnowNow, an interesting RSS-based alert system (they call it “elerts”). I’d like to understand this one better and am hoping to sit down with Ron this week.

Orb

Ian McCarthy gave us a tantalizing presentation on Orb, which allows you to stream content from your home computer to any wifi device without the need for any hardware. It works extremely well for video, photos, etc. He even pulled up a video cam in his living room and used Orb to turn the light on. Cool. It’s PC only right now though.

Wink

Michael Tanne took the password protections off Wink today so we could finally get a look. Wink is “people powered search” and methinks they are on to something powerful. They take basic search results and allow people to tag and rank them to create a much better result set. They’ve called their technology “tagrank”.

Damnit, Michael, answer my emails and give me an interview tomorrow.

Allpeers

Matthew Gertner presented on allpeers, an open platform to develop applications on firefox. Allpeers is in private beta currently.

Flock

Bart Decrem gave a Flock demo. What more can I say about Flock? I love it in a way that isn’t natural. If they could find a way to integrate Pandora direclty into the Flock browser, I’d never leave my computer again.

But seriously, I’ve got my hands on the new version and will do a full profile this week.

PubSub

Founder Bob Wyman spoke about PubSub, structured blogging and their new LinkRanks product, which we wrote about here. More on PubSub, our favorite prospective search engine, here.