Besides its new people search functionality Wink seems to be a pretty run of the mill social search engine. Once Wink users login they can create collections, upload bookmarks, tag items, change rankings of results and all those other things Jim Lanzone thinks searchers are too lazy to do.
So the differentiating factor is Wink’s MySpace, Bebo and LinkedIn search.
According to Kirkpatrick at TechCrunch, Wink indexed more than 100 million profiles.
Why social media marketers should take interest: “Results can be filtered by network, gender, age and single/taken status.”
Since I began watching the social search space I’ve been pushing folks such as the bald and brilliant PreFound mastermind Steve Mansfield to identify a niche and dig into it (not that this is necessary for success – I just want to see what they come up with).
Wink has the potential to become a dating (er… stalking), job search and social network marketing mecca now with their targeted crawl.
Their company name certainly suggests a *type* of searching. I’m not sure how the SERPs augmentation aspects of Wink will play out in a dating/job search environment – perhaps there will be some “recommend these results to a friend” functionalities to emerge, or perhaps a single login to multiple social networks.
However Wink evolves (and evolve they will – they have a strong team) it is for now an interesting tool for social marketers to find a demographic for testing their one to one marketing efforts.
For example, if you happen to be selling knitting patterns here are 66,000 people you might want to be friends with.
Now all we need is a Wink API to plug into our MySpace bots 😉
About the Author:
Garrett French creates content strategies and social media PR campaigns.
