Wink becomes a meta-expert locator
Wink is joining the people search game, you can now update your profile by entering all your online identities, and describe yourself with tags.
Take it with you via a widget, see an example on the Laughing Squid Blog:
- it has a link to each of that person’s various websites they author
- tags (displays bookmarks and people with that tag)
- search box (displays people with that tag)
Here is a people search for “opml“.
This is amazing it searches in the interests/profile pages of the meta-identity of these Wink people.
So if a Wink person has added to their profile, links to their other various profiles: Bebo, Friendster, LinkedIn, Live Spaces, MySpace. Then a people search in Wink will search in the interests/profile metadata of all these services.
The benefit of this is I can meta-search people interests/tags from the one site, I don’t have to go to each of these services above to search for people by interest, I can do if all from Wink.
The only thing I noticed is that a people search for “opml” didn’t return me, and I have tagged myself with the the term “opml” in my actual Wink profile. So a people search is serching for these terms across the 5 current networks, but what about Wink itself.
Another bonus is advanced searching, limit this to: location, distance, name, gender, status, age or network.
Another service called Ziki allows you to tag yourself so you can search for people by interest/tag, just like in Wink and even Explode.
These services allow you to add links (Explode and Ziki) or stream content (Ziki) from all your other online identities, but where Wink shines is that it will extract the people tags from all these other online identites.
Lijit is also people search, manage all your online identities and search the full-text across all your identities, also add friends so you can search across your profile and their profile at the same time.
NOTE: Lijit doesn’t let you describe yourself with tags.
So I guess Wink has gone the granular step and is searching interest/profile metadata across all your identities.
Feedback
Within your Wink profile you can manage all your identities (and get ‘em on a widget), but in the Wink people search it will only search interest profiles in 5 online identity services, these all being social networks. It can’t search your people tags in del.icio.us because there isn’t any, it can’t search your people tags in your blog, because their isn’t any.
Since MyBlogLog represents my blog, then I suppose it could search my “About me” metadata in my MyBlogLog account.
I guess Wink will start expanding this list, I’d like to include Yedda, MyBlogLog, and Ziki added.
As I mentioned before I don’t know why it doesn’t search for interests tags in people’s actual Wink profile.
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