Global Moxie
http://globalmoxie.com/blog/wink.shtmlWink, Wink, Nudge, Nudge: More on People Search
Wink.com helps to consolidate your various web 2.0 incarnations.
Following up on my recent blog post about the Spock search engine, reader Matthew Stotts pointed me to Wink.com, a people search engine that launched six months ago. Wink is certainly interesting and serves a useful niche, but doesn’t quite hit the general-purpose people search that I think the web needs. That doesn’t mean that it’s not useful.
In a nutshell, Wink’s strength is finding people by way of the accounts they hold at various social media services. It’s a good way to find out if your friend has a MySpace page or LinkedIn profile, or for you to advertise the same to your personal network of friends and colleagues. Wink also lets you claim IDs so that you can consolidate your various identities into a single page. With that done, you can create a badge to put on your site or blog to display the status of your web 2.0 incarnations. See what it looks like by visiting my Wink profile page.
(YoName.com offers a far more stripped-down version of profile search for a limited number of social network sites.)
So, that’s all very cool, and within that scope Wink does a good job. That said, the site doesn’t appear to do a lot for people who are not actively involved in these types of sites. And it’s not clear what relevance or weighting is applied to searches for people who don’t have Wink accounts.
I’m still waiting for a service that can really give a full 360-degree view of someone’s identity on the web.
Using Tim O’Reilly’s Spock example of Eric Schmidt, for example, there’s no sign of the Google CEO in the search results. The first page of results finds Eric Schmidts in San Antonio (“Just a regular guy that likes to sing opera, loves movies, and is a big dorko”), San Francisco (“For the most part I’m a pretty laid back, funny, witty guy”), Allentown (“I’m all about getting children to learn grammar and be able to write”), etc.
Similarly, before I created my Wink profile page, I fared substantially worse in the results for a Josh Clark search than I did in Google. The only result I could find was a link to my LinkedIn profile several pages into the results. My LinkedIn profile isn’t very central to me; it exists only because I’ve accepted invitations from other users. So Wink didn’t exactly turn up my most relevant results. (After creating a profile, I’m now first in Wink’s search results).
Wink seems to be a great service to find people very active in the social web and, particularly, people who have created a profile. It’s a useful profile-search service that seems to work best when you actively manage your Wink page.
But I’m still waiting for a service that can really give a full 360-degree view of someone’s identity on the web, even for regular folks who don’t participate in social networks. Something that can truly provide a canonical page for an individual.
Spock promises to do this, and perhaps Wink will evolve that way, too. Looking forward to finding out... and to seeing if it’s even possible to overcome the implicit privacy concerns that this approach suggests.