Wink, a place to flirt — and prowl

November 10, 2006 | Matt Marshall | Comments |

winklogo.bmpWink, 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.

winkpeople.bmp

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About the Author, Matt Marshall

Matt Marshall is editor and CEO of VentureBeat. Follow him on Twitter at @mmarshall, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.

  • Wink doesn't index any profiles that people have set to private. Of course, there are legitimate reasons why you wouldn't want to be found or searchable, but all social networks allow you to control that.
    Here are some privacy resources.
  • Thanks Matthew, have updated piece with the link.
  • Here is the direct link to either remove your public profile (which is very limited to begin with) or to add more information from your LinkedIn profile to your public profile via simple check boxes:
    http://www.linkedin.com/myprofile?editwp=

    BTW, it seems that http://www.linkedin.com/in/matt is still available, so you better get it before another Matt gets it for his Web profile :-)
  • Wink also has a couple major flaws with their technology that greatly reduces the usefulness of the people search. Mainly, they can't tell if two different profiles are of the same person (repeated results), and they also can't differentiate between people, bands, companies, tv shows, etc. More on that here:

    http://www.socialdegree.com/2006/11/10/winkcom-...