The Wink user-enhanced search engine, in private beta for the last few months, launches Thursday morning to the world. Wink has evolved substantially since my October 12, 2005 review. Wink is, at its core, a combination of traditional search with feature-rich social bookmarking. Bookmarked/tagged results appear above normal search. Search results can be bookmarked, tagged and rated from Wink. The same functionality is available via a bookmarklet that works with Firefox, Safari and IE. As a twist, users can also block “bad” pages. Lots of functional Ajax is built into the interface. Users can easily browse tag results (either their own, or all users). There are three key additional features. First, Wink has added two way synchronization with del.icio.us bookmarks. And they’ve added a “Keep Sync’d” feature that, as the name implies, maintains a constant one or two-way syncronization with del.icio.us. No word on whether they will add in other social bookmarking services over time or not. Second, Wink allows the creation of “collections”, which is a tag group (tags of tags). Collections are controlled by one user but can be shared with anyone. Third, and this feature really appeals to me, Wink has added a “Wink Answers” tab to search results. The text is a wiki – meaning anyone can edit it. For queries that have complicated results, a number of options appear. A lot of data has been pre-populated, and I believe this will be a popular feature. Like Wikipedia, it begs for user interaction, but with a lower intimidation factor. Wink is also finalizing a nice blog widget that includes additional links (that point only to bookmarks created by the blogger). See here for an example. I have not had the opportunity to test this myself yet, but it looks interesting. Congratulations to Founder Michael Tanne and the entire Wink team. → Read More
Jookster‘s search engine launched yesterday. Like Wink, Jookster is aiming to provide more relevant search results by putting user-generated bookmarked links above normal results. Unlike Wink, which allows users to add significant metadata to bookmarked pages (tags and reviews), Jookster determines relevance of bookmarked queries solely based on a keyword analysis of content on the bookmarked page. Any web page may be bookmarked, or “Jooked” by users. No additional metadata is requested at the time of bookmarking. These results are shows above normal search results on Jooked. A key part of the service is associating with friends. When you perform a search, you have the option of determining who’s bookmarks are also included – just you, friends of friends, one more level out, etc. The Jookster idea is great, but the lack of metadata associated with the bookmarks (particularly tags) means it will not return results nearly as relevant as Wink results. I also question whether users will have any real incentive to give up browser real estate to yet another bookmarklet, and bookmark pages. John Cook also writes about Jookster today. → Read More
Wink is a very interesting new search site that combines traditional search results with del.icio.us and other user generated metadata. We profiled Wink on October 12, 2005 and Michael Tanne, the CEO, gave a demo at our party last week. Wink was also one of the sponsors of our party. Wink is in private beta right now and are dripping in new users a few at a time to test the service. Thousands of people have been waiting weeks to get in. As part of their sponsorship of our party, Wink has agreed to guarantee immediate access to the first 100 people who request a beta account at Wink and write “techcruncher” in the note section. This process is automated – if you don’t receive an immediate invitation you either misspelled “techcruncher” or 100 people have already requested an invite with the code. If you aren’t one of the first 100, they will still make an effort to get you to the top of the list. Michael has requested that I stress that beta testers should be willing to spend some time helping them build out the service. You can do that by tagging results, syncing with your del.icio.us tags, creating search sets and, generally, performing a lot of searches. → Read More
Company: Wink Launched: in Private Beta Status: Funded by Greylock Partners Location: Mountain View Wink gave a brief demo at at Web2.0 last week and we were immediately hooked. Wink is still in private beta (you can request an account on their home page), but I’ve had a chance to talk with CEO Michael Tanne and I’ve been using it all week. At its core Wink is a search engine, and they’ve intelligently layered in shared user participation to give fresh, meaningful results that, Wink argues, can’t be found anywhere else. The key user participation features are tagging, rating and sharing. Our goal at Wink is to combine search with user participation to give you fresher, more accurate, spam-free search. You can create tags, rate results and keep track of sites you’ve visited. You can create Search Sets of tags that show your expertise in a subject, and you can make those publicly available to be shared with other people. Wink also has concepts that are created and updated by users like you, so feel free to edit existing concepts, or even write your own! Because Wink is “people-powered”, it will only get better when people tag, rate, and share. So please make Wink your default search engine, use it everyday, and let us know how you like it. And if you help us out by contributing or giving us feedback, we’ll give you some invitations of your own to send out! Core search results are provided by Google and wikipedia. A search query returns those results, which you can tag and rate from 0-5 stars. A zero rating help to block out spam and other bad content, eventually removing it from the index altogether. This user-created metadata (when aggregated) helps Wink return more relevant results to the entire community. Wink has taken del.icio.us bookmark data to fill out their results with rich tagging content right from the start. For future queries, tagged/rated results appear above normal search results. Also within search results is an area where Wink users are listed that have tagged results with the query used. Clicking on any user takes you to a page that shows all of their public tags and ratings. If you find that you like a user’s tags and ratings, you can subscribe to those results via RSS. There are a ton of other features as well that I am discovering as → Read More
Here’s the second set of companies that presented at the Web 2.0 conference Launchpad workshop. See Part 1 here. Zvents My friend Ethan Stock showed off Zvents, which launched last night. We’ve written about zvents here and here. In a nutshell, Zvents helps you create and locate the tens of thousands of monthly local events and has tons of awesome ajax, tagging and other web2.0 stuff. KnowNow Ron Rasmussen talked about KnowNow, an interesting RSS-based alert system (they call it “elerts”). I’d like to understand this one better and am hoping to sit down with Ron this week. Orb Ian McCarthy gave us a tantalizing presentation on Orb, which allows you to stream content from your home computer to any wifi device without the need for any hardware. It works extremely well for video, photos, etc. He even pulled up a video cam in his living room and used Orb to turn the light on. Cool. It’s PC only right now though. Wink Michael Tanne took the password protections off Wink today so we could finally get a look. Wink is “people powered search” and methinks they are on to something powerful. They take basic search results and allow people to tag and rank them to create a much better result set. They’ve called their technology “tagrank”. Damnit, Michael, answer my emails and give me an interview tomorrow. Allpeers Matthew Gertner presented on allpeers, an open platform to develop applications on firefox. Allpeers is in private beta currently. Flock Bart Decrem gave a Flock demo. What more can I say about Flock? I love it in a way that isn’t natural. If they could find a way to integrate Pandora direclty into the Flock browser, I’d never leave my computer again. But seriously, I’ve got my hands on the new version and will do a full profile this week. PubSub Founder Bob Wyman spoke about PubSub, structured blogging and their new LinkRanks product, which we wrote about here. More on PubSub, our favorite prospective search engine, here. → Read More
San Francisco, CA
