Hey there,
More good news about Wink. They made the finals for the Open Web Awards for Social Search. For some lame reason they are competing against Facebook in this category. Last I checked, facebook isn't a search engine. So vote for Wink!
Whoa! Wink was named by Time magazine as one of the top ten web sites of the year! Number three to be exact. Well that's pretty darn satisfying! Congratulations to Michael and everyone on the Wink team. I'm very happy for you guys.
"#3. Wink.com
With more than 200 million people signed up for social networks, how can you quickly find your best buddy from second grade, that guy you dated in high school, or your co-worker from three jobs ago? The people search engine Wink.com sorts through all of these profiles so you can easily find and connect online with long lost friends. Recent upgrades to the site also allow users to control their search profiles on the Wink search engine. Delete that unflattering picture, remove the rude post, and present yourself as you'd like to be seen — instead of letting the search engine take complete control."
Today Wink launched their long planned and developed redesign and tech upgrade. The site looks great and is now prepared for growth. They've totally redesigned the interface, it's fresh, appealing, and fast. This was the last thing I worked on before I left and am happy to see it take shape. They've also increased the size of the corpus and are nearly at 300,000,000 profiles. Great stuff!
In my view, the next step for Wink is to dive deep on the engine itself. There's a ton of work there already, of course, but freshness and relevancy (as well as size) is key. I also feel that FOAFing (friend of friend browsing) is key to helping people find people. Finding a way to use a person as a pivot point to other interesting people and activities is a cool after effect of people search.
They know all this and I know that they're on it. I'm really thrilled with this release and can't wait to see how far they go. Congrats to my friends at Wink!
We just dotted the "i's" as it were on the terms of service and have now released the first Wink developer API. It's an AJAX based people search engine. To quote myself...
"The Wink AJAX People Search API allows you to access Wink data to build out your own applications on your own site with JavaScript. You can embed a simple search box and display results on your own site or use it to create killer, innovative applications. Mashups, practical, and professional applications are all welcome."
Have fun and let me know what you do with it! I can envision some cool maps or flickr mashups with it. Heck, build out a Netvibes widget or a Facebook Application! ;)
Wink is being nominated for some awards recently, which is really cool. First the NextWeb awards and now CNET's Webware 100. We're very excited about this and honored to be considered one of the best sites on the web. We think this adds to the validity of what we're doing and the vertical search category that we've established. But it's not enough to be nominated, no matter what Kate Winslet says. It's about winning.
So please take a look and vote for us. We are once again, pitted against Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and some other known folks... these guys don't need any more attention. It's good company to be mentioned with, but c'mon vote for your friendly neighborhood people search engine!
okay the real reason I want you to vote on this is that we're beta testing this concept and trying to get some idea of its usefulness, value, etc... So do me a favor... interact with this widget thing below or on the side here, then tell my why you did or didn't and what your thoughts are on the thing in the comments of this post. It would really help me out. :) Thanks! And I will dye my hair blue, but I need to know if this thing works first! ;)
The next few posts are going to be a little experiment in finding people. I don't know what you'd call this, I'm sure there's a name for it, but let's just call it "Friend Fishing" or "Buddy Lost & Found." Oh I don't know... All I'm going to do is title my next few posts with the names of the friends that I'm looking for. These will be real people that I've lost touch with over the years.
I expect one of two things to happen. Either that person will search on their name and find it, or someone they know will search on their name and find it. Either way I'm relying on the fact that my blog has pretty good pagerank and my posts get indexed well inside google and yahoo. So let's see how this works...
We just rolled out a little beta feature addition to Wink profiles... Blurbs. Blurbs are a simple way for you or your friends to say something or ask something about you. We feel that it helps to round out your identity. But really it's a fun way to get a quick opinion or express your affinity about something. As you can see... mine is on the top right side of this page.
I have one blurb... "Should I dye my hair blue?" This was a joke example that we used to help describe what blurbs can do... But I've decided that if enough people vote with a thumb-up, then I will actually dye my hair blue!
So it's up to you... blue or no blue? Go ahead and vote away.
Wink has quietly created a nice little widget for you to share who you are and where you are any where you like. Perhaps you've seen it on the right side of this here blog... --->
I think that this widget is somewhat unique in that it will work almost anywhere that allows you to paste in html. We have three versions, they are all customizable and can follow any color scheme or style sheet. Version one is a JavaScript/HTML version that will work great on most blogs. Version two is Flash, it's more compact and has some slick but simple interaction. Version 3 is mainly graphical. This will work well on MySpace, WordPress, Yahoo! 360, Flickr, even sig files. The idea is to make it easy for you to promote all your stuff online. Your online life as it were. (Digital Life?) Simply create a Wink account and fill up your profile with your personal pages, then go and make the widget. It's pretty straight forward. We'll be adding more features very soon, including different wink widgets, so stay tuned. Go ahead and start promoting yourself and all the places that you are online!
If you make one, post a comment here or send me a message: beach [at] wink . com
While you're at it, check it out at Laughing Squid. Nice and black and green!
Here they are:
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where i'm at...
   
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This is a question that we're (Wink) trying to understand. What is People Search? On the surface it's pretty easy to answer. But when you start to think about it, complications arise.
For years people search has been an online white pages. It allowed you to search for a name to get physical addresses and phone numbers in various locations. Then it went in a darker direction. People search became an investigation tool to search for background information on individuals; criminal records, credit reports, gun ownership, back childcare, and the like...
This is all fine and good, but clearly there's something missing.
Nearly everyone on the web has a public identity. Perhaps everyone. In fact most people have several. These identities consist of user profiles and personal information pages that reside on any given web site. Here are some examples: an Amazon Wish List, a MySpace page, a blog, an online email id, Yahoo! ID, a Flickr account, YouTube, del.icio.us, a message board or group id, etc. etc. Not to mention all the new 2.0 services that spring up every day that encourage you to share yourself in various ways. Too many to list them all.
This is a good thing. The more that is shared the better. A side effect for all of these identities is that your interests are also shared. Either explicitly, such as with social networks or implicitly through published content or other activity. And many times your friends or other connections are available. This adds up to an interesting opportunity.
The next wave of people search is about finding online identities. It can be finding a specific person or a community of people. 95% of all people searches right now are name searches. Perhaps many of those are vanity searches (people searching for themselves), but many more are people trying to locate a specific individual. Because of this, the white page and background search companies have been making a decent living along with Google and other general search engines. But few of them can also facilitate decent online identity searches. None of them can help you find people interested in knitting in Santa Fe, or a school teacher in Iowa (or in Iraq for that matter). How about World of Warcraft players near San Francisco?
People search will include trusted degrees of separation search as well. You may want to find that person you met at your friends party who likes opera. You may want to find a baby sitter. It's even conceivable that you may want to search through your friends identity content or their friends identity content. The start up Lijit is looking into this as well as some others...
The important thing to remember is that people searches should not be limited by a single network or community. It takes several communities or services to make up an online identity and they should all be findable. This brings up a feature layer of people search. Online Identity Management. Wink is exploring this right now. Since there are so many places sprinkled about that a person can have a piece of themselves, it seems logical that there is a need for people to consolidate these identities and aggregate them. This allows people to have more control over how their identity is presented and can be found. Without getting too geeky, meta connections can be made and managed so that friends and contacts can keep up with each other from a single place.
I don't know where this is going, or what it all means right now. We're working on figuring it out. So let me know if you have any thoughts on the subject. Have a good weekend.
As you may know, we've been working hard on Wink people search. We index MySpace, LinkedIn, Bebo, and more coming soon. Anyway here's something stupid I found I could do with Wink ;)... Presenting The Tom Page. And I'm supposed to be packing. Oh and digg it why don't you?
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