Streakr, a site that in private testing had a lot of buzz (we’ve covered it twice previously) launched in beta today. Streakr is pitched as follows: Streakr brings users the best of the web. They simply download a ‘discovery’ bar onto their browsers which, at the touch of a button, finds dozens of new websites that match their interests. They can then rate the sites they like and dislike by stamping them with a ‘thumbs up’ or ‘thumbs down’ icon. Once selected, the URLs are saved onto their personal profile page and indexed for future reference. The sites, which users can also review, can then be shared with fellow Streakrs via the social network. The politest way of describing Streakr: MySpace and StumbleUpon got together and had a learning impaired child. When first mentioned in March, Streakr was suppose to be a site with “attitude”, and yet the only attitude Streakr delivers is a social network that looks nearly identical to MySpace (complete with ugly profile pages) but lacks nearly all the features. Then there is the site surfing/ toolbar feature that is nothing more than a StumbleUpon clone. Users are also given the ability to search for friends on other social networking sites, however why someone would search for friends on other sites via Streakr and not Google, or the social networking sites themselves was not explained and there is no aggregation tools that could make this an interesting feature. To be fair it’s only a beta launch, so perhaps Streakr will deliver a more compelling product in the future, but clearly the hype had no place in reality. If you’ve always wanted to be part of a social network built around a StumpleUpon style service, you might find some enjoyment from Streakr, for the rest of us; there is not a lot to see. → Read More
I moderated a fascinating panel tonight at Google headquarters that included execs from three “people search engines” – the CEO of Wink (Michael Tanne), the CEO of Spock (Jaideep Singh), and the COO of Zoominfo (Bryan Burdick). The panel was very timely. Earlier today the Wall Street Journal published an article called “You’re Nobody Unless Your Name Googles Well” that outlined the exact problem these search engines are trying to solve – finding information about people on the web, many of whom have identical names. The article didn’t mention the efforts of these startups, instead focusing entirely on Google, but it did note a few interesting statistics. There are, for example, 158 million results on Google for the name “John Smith” (I actually see 225 million, but who’s counting). Big statistics are thrown around when people talk about people search. Singh says around 30% of searches are people-related. Tanne says 2 billion searches per month are on people (Facebook data tends to suggest this is probably vastly underestimated). Still, it’s not clear that this market is huge. The big advertising dollars tend to come in for product and service-related searches, not for searches on John Smith. Spock, Wink and Zoominfo each have very different products, reflecting their different philosophies on business models, target markets, and control over information. Wink Wink changed course in November 2006 and began providing search results on people from social networks like MySpace, LinkedIn and Bebo. Users search based on name, geography and other criteria (company, school, whatever) and see results from major social networks. Tanne says they now have over 175 million distinct individuals indexed on their site. Users can claim their Wink profile, proving their ownership of various profiles on social networks by entering in the email they use for those accounts. Wink relies on advertising for revenue, and Tanne says they can get $2 or so in revenue per thousand page impressions. He also hinted at other revenue streams down the road, such as lead generation for other services. Wink raised $7 million in venture capital but did a partial stock buy-back earlier this year. Spock Spock hasn’t launched yet, but the demos we’ve seen show it to be a direct competitor to Wink. The company, which raised $7 million in a Series A round of financing, is in private beta and should launch in the next couple of months. See our overview → Read More
Vivek, over at Startup Squad, recently discovered a new social network and social networking meta search engine, Streakr. The main URL still says the site is coming soon. The new engine lets you search the profiles on the major networks (MySpace, Hi5, Bebo, and Facebook) as well at it’s own social network. It appears to be a hook to draw people into their main service, like Wink did when they launched their own profile search and Rapleaf had with UpScoop. Profile management tool ProfileLinker also has a search engine. Streakr’s social network is like Delicious for cool kids and is a less flashy take on Trig. It includes a profiles, a toolbar, and a stumble upon feature that lets you flip through links in a given category. Here’s the one for video. The profiles look a lot like MySpace, consisting of the usual details, about me, photos, and seizure inducing layouts. Xenia is Streakrs’ Tom. However, where MySpace puts a blog and comments, Streakr puts in favorite links and your “thumbs up” rating for each. You can input the links into your profile manually, or use the Streakr toolbar to add links to your profile and vote on them. The toolbar also provides an interface to all the other functionality on the main site, and is currently only for IE, requires the .NET framework, and takes forever and a day to download and install. There are a couple other sites with social networking meta search. Here’s the lowdown on a few: Wink Wink is fast and simple. It searches Friendster, MySpace, Bebo, LinkedIn, and Live Spaces. It also has advanced search features, like location, sex, status, age, and interests. It also lets you narrow your search by those fields after your first search. ProfileLinker ProfileLinker is the most comprehensive search engine, with 84 social networking sites including general, blog, cultural, dating, professional, student, and special interest networks. Unfortunately you have to log in to use it. UpScoop UpScoop comes ahead in ease of use. Unlike the others, UpScoop searches by email based on all the contacts in your address book. It searches Bebo, Classmates, Ecademy, Flickr, Friendster, Hi5, Livejournal, Multiply, MySpace, Ringo, Tickle, Tribe, Yelp, Mog, and LinkedIn. While it finds the vast majority of your friends off the bat, some drawbacks are that it can take UpScoop up to a couple hours to search for the last few and → Read More
London based social-network-service Streakr is just a twinkle in its founder’s eye and could be months from launch, but they’ve got a fancy logo and they promise to deliver a product with attitude. I like that. Give them your email if you want to hear when they launch, or watch for a full profile here. → Read More
