Wink, a place to flirt — and prowl
Wink, the social search engine that searches for Web pages that people have bookmarked, tagged or otherwise marked as interesting, has introduced a people search.
You click the people tab (see screenshot below), and you get results from three leading social networks, Bebo, LinkedIn and MySpace. You can filter by gender, age, and dating status — and you can see where this is headed.
This is a good move by LinkedIn to highlight its people search, because we’ve mentioned how Spock is coming after them soon. (Update: Turns out, LinkedIn had nothing to do with this – Wink crawled and indexed all publicly available LinkedIn profiles).
Great for flirting. But also convenient for older men on MySpace, known to prowl — and one reason for the surprising find that there’s so many older people using that site. Wink, of course, makes this even easier for the creeps, and it’s not like someone can opt out of being searched. (Update: Matthew Stotts provides a link to some helpful advice on this). VentureBeat editor “Matt Marshall” is No. 1 of 4,885 Matt Marshalls (we’re stopping the criticism), and I’m not even on Bebo yet — plus I apparently enjoy the luxury of anonymity (no picture).
Our first big mention of Wink was here.
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About the Author, Matt Marshall
Matt launched VentureBeat in September of 2006, with the realization that no one else was covering the entrepreneurial and tech innovation scene with the velocity or depth that he was. Prior to founding VentureBeat, he covered venture capital for the San Jose Mercury News from 2001 to 2006. In 2002, Matt was awarded "Journalist of the Year" by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists. Prior to working at the Merc, he was a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Bonn, Germany from 1995 to 1998, and a writer for the Washington Post in 1994. Matt holds a PhD in Government and an MA in German and European Studies from Georgetown University. In addition to VentureBeat, Matt is also the Executive Producer of DEMO, the leading launchpad event for emerging technologies.
