Wink.com - Social Network People Search

Disclaimer: I work for ZoomInfo.com, who is in a semi similar space as Wink.com’s people search. Take my opinion as you may.

Wink.com launched a people search component to their social search engine today. The people search currently crawls Myspace, Bebo, and LinkedIN and claims to have over 100 million people in their database (Inaccurate number, see below). They have currently said that they will add one new network every two weeks in order of user demand.

The latest social networking boom has seen hundreds of different social networks launch. With a larger portion of social networking users belonging to multiple networks, I definitely see a need for this service. But this trend of users belonging to multiple social networks also presents a problem that Wink’s technology isn’t currently solving.

Wink’s search has no way of recognizing that two profiles on different networks are of the same exact person. This not only inflates their reported number of people, but makes it harder for any user to get a complete picture on a person.

In addition I have noticed that Wink’s search technology has trouble actually figuring out if a profile is of a person. As we all know, Myspace is littered with profiles of companies, organizations, and of course bands. A search for “All American Rejects”, a band, brings up a lot of profiles of The All American Rejects, not people who like the All American Rejects. Or a search for popular TV show “Sex and the City” returns fake profiles created for the show, not people who like the show.

Wink will also run into problems with a lot of networks who are completely username/password protected, such as Facebook.

All in all, I like the concept. But to be a truly useful people search Wink has a long way to go.

[tags]Social Network, Social Networking, People Search, Wink, Wink.com, Wink People Search, Social Media, Brian Balfour[/tags]