VentureBeat

Reunion.com, a social network of sorts that aggregates data about you, is merging with people-focused search engine Wink. The two companies will relaunch as a single, branded people search service early next year. They already made a strategic partnership last year, and Reunion.com began providing Wink’s search engine on its site then.

Los Angeles-based Reunion.com started in 2002 as more of a social network than what it is today. Since then, it has collected user information directly from users, crawled the web and bought publicly available data from other companies, chief executive Jeff Tinsley tells me. Today, the company has more than 500 million user profiles. Mountain View, Calif.-based Wink, meanwhile, has 200 million profiles based on composites of data it has collected from social networks and other sites.

These profiles may include information made searchable by social networks that you’re a part of, like your public profile on Facebook or LinkedIn, or any of 60 other sources. The companies match up pieces of data from various sources to figure out things like your age, your work history and the city you live in.

The opportunity, Tinsley claims, is that there are currently more than five billion searches happening on the web every month, and only a fifth are happening on Google and other major search engines. Reunion.com has nearly 50 million registered users, and gets 14 million unique users a month, according to comScore. Traffic comes from various forms of advertising, viral growth, etc. As with many people search companies, Reunion.com has not been without controversy. It has occasionally been nailed by reporters — and by the Better Business Bureau — for sending spammy emails that trick people into inviting their friends to join the site. This is an all-too-common method used by web services to grow virally; let’s hope the Wink-Reunion entity won’t have these problems.

Reunion.com is making $55 million in revenue this year, according to Tinsley, and expects to make more than $100 million based on its merger with Wink and a distribution deal for the two companies’ combined people search product.

Oak Investment Partners put a $25 million first round of funding into Reunion.com last year. Wink has received backing from Greylock Partners, although its management bought back some shares; its angel investors include Reid Hoffman, Peter Thiel and Richard Rosenblatt.

For years, technology to search for people has been neglected, compared to most parts of the Web. Until now, that is.

A wave of new entrants are making it much easier to find out everything about a person, from their job, to their personalities, their age and even where they live. Forget the privacy implications, the race is on.

LinkedIn, a social network for professionals, had the field to itself a few years ago. Sites like Friendster let you search for friends, but it wasn’t ordered for full-on people search.

Only over the past year or so has there been a frantic rush to offer more sophisticated people search. Facebook, for example, has emerged into a networking tool, and increasingly a place where people search for each other. Here’s the latest string of developments:

–ZoomInfo, one of the largest contacts site that lets you search a database of people and company profiles, will announce next Wednesday it will open to let developers build create applications on its platform. ZoomInfo is one of the more mature people search sites, but for while had remained relatively closed. The public API can be found here, http://developer.zoominfo.com (this will work next week) with more documentation. ZoomInfo has already worked with Amazon A9, Compete and Xing on this. For example, take a look at Compete’s profile on CNET, and you’ll see that it carries a widget on the right with more information provided by ZoomInfo.

– ZoomInfo now lets you look up full profiles at its site, and through widgets via its API; it merely limits the number of searches you can do on people. You have to pay to search high numbers of people, and to search by certain sub-category of occupation, for example. Related: ZoomInfo and a business networking site, Xing, announced a partnership to integrate their services in June, and there’s news next week on that front too. Xing adds the networking features that ZoomInfo hadn’t had until now.

– Viadeo, is a French-based company that lets you add a profile and then search for contacts according to industry they work in, or any other number of variables. It also lets you search for jobs. We registered, tried it out and found it functional. Each person tags themselves according to subjects they’re interested in, and people can get in touch with each other. The company is similar to LinkedIn. It just raised €5 million in funding (see Mashable) from its existing backers AGF Private Equity and Ventech. It has more than 1.3 million members. It now operates in several European countries, and is expanding into Chinese via a partnership with Tianji, a Chinese social network. (screenshot at bottom)

– Yahoo China has just released a new version of its search, Yahoo.cn, that includes a people search, though it’s focused on celebrities. Yahoo uses information extraction technology and semantic analysis to create a Flash-based map of relationships, along with explanations of why they are related to and the sources of the information. China Web 2.0 provides an example of Jack Ma. Another Chinese company, Koowo, reportedly got $5.5 million for among other things, a similar mapping of Chinese stars. However, the downside is that these offerings often appear to be inaccurate. Finally, there’s Ucloo, the Chinese people search, that last we heard was looking to raise a round of capital.

– Spock, the Silicon Valley start-up focused on people search, got off to a good start mid last month, when it hit the list of fastest growing sites, according to Alexa, even if it had some well-reported snafus (Spock lets users tag other people in profiles with words to describe them, and some people have complained about being tagged with insulting words). It joins Wink, another Silicon Valley company focused on people search.

–And this just in: There’s a new company called PeekYou. However, it looks considerably more lightweight, compared to Spock and others, perhaps because it has just launched, with less preparation than the others (Techcrunch has more).

Updated

Apple TV is a hit — According to early accounts, at least.

YouTube killer? — [Update: This has been confirmed.] Rumors have existed for some time about collusion among the big-media players to challenge YouTube, the king of video sharing. Now the LA Times reports that News Corp. and NBC Universal plan to announce as soon as today that they’re building an online video site “stocked with TV shows and movies, plus clips that users can modify and share with friends.” Not clear how MySpace fits into this.

More on Google’s Pay-Per-Action — We mentioned Google’s PPA announcement Tuesday. However, we didn’t point specifically to the “text link format” ad unit, which some say crosses an ethical line, because it can be considered a pay-per-post. Mike at Techcrunch has a good review. More about the general PPA program at the Mercury News.

Wink sees management buyback — Wink, a start-up that began as a search engine for tags, has revised its business plan, and wants to be a search engine for people. However, some investors balked at this turn, and so Wink’s management has bought back shares from some of the investors — though the exact amount wasn’t specified. Lead investor Greylock has reduced its stake, though remains the largest shareholder, the company confirmed with VentureBeat today. Wink had raised $7 million.

Oil behind the Doerr — PEHub writes more on the ties between well-known venture capitalist John Doerr and oil, noting that Doerr and his wife Ann wrote a $1,000 check this year to Ted Stevens, the Republican senator from Alaska who has repeatedly tried to approve oil drilling in Alaska’s Artic National Wildlife Refuge. Again, this seems to fly in the face of Doerr’s leadership in supporting green policy in Washington and boosting investments in alternative energy. Doerr did not respond to a request for comment yesterday. [Update: To be fair, its entirely possible Doerr wrote the check to help get Stevens' ear, in a shrewd effort to push green policy, but we just don't know...]

Yahoo releases latest widgets for your desktop — They’re designed to use less memory. Here’s a tour.

Other:
–In our Newswire: Amp’d Mobile has raised a whopping round, and reportedly has 200,000 subscribers.
–For those of you relying on our RSS feed, we’ve been making changes, and you may have missed the piece by Stu Phillips, about ruthless scrapers of content, and how publishers need to join ‘em, since they can’t beat ‘em. Michael Cerda, meanwhile, writes a piece about the new wave called “Phone 2.0.”