Webware

Social network Reunion.com has made a new friend: people search service Wink. The two have merged in a new deal that promises to make it dramatically easier to find people on the Web.

Early next year, the merger will produce "an entirely new brand," the companies said. The two have not said what its name will be, nor have financial details been disclosed. With the dual technologies of Reunion and Wink, the companies say that they will be able to search more than 700 million social-networking profiles. They'll be able to search profiles on MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Friendster, AOL's Bebo, Microsoft's Windows Live Spaces, Yahoo, Xanga, and Twitter--among others.

Numbers from Nielsen last month indicated that Reunion.com, which says it receives 12 million unique visitors each month, is one of the fastest-growing social networks in the U.S. despite the fact that it's hardly on the radar of Twittering blog pundits. Its biggest demographic, according to Nielsen, is those between 55 and 64 who are looking to re-connect with friends and classmates.

"Through this merger, we're redefining the people search space by bridging existing social networks and providing consumers with the tools they need to find, be found, and stay connected," Wink CEO Michael Tanne said in a release. "We're aiming to create an entirely new online experience that simplifies people's lives by making it easy to find and keep up with everyone they know. There will be exciting developments in the coming months as we integrate our strengths and push our business forward."

123people, a service that collects information available on the Web about people from sources like Flickr, Google, and Facebook, announced that it has started operating in the United States. Previous to the announcement, 123people was only available in Europe as it was working the kinks out in its beta.

"After months of private beta, tweaking, and adding new features to improve the high-powered people search, 123people launches to the U.S. public," a company representative wrote in a blog post. "Now anyone can search for everyone they want to know."

123people, which competes with other people-finding services like Wink and Spock, features a relatively simple start page--a single search box that asks you to input a person's first and last name--but a results page that offers a slew of information that it gathers from sources across the Web.

The service gathers phone numbers, e-mail addresses, Google search results, pictures from Google images and Flickr, Facebook profiles, videos, news results, and even blogs to give the person searching a glimpse into all the information that can be collected about a particular person on the Internet. Along with the ability to find phone numbers, 123people includes a link next to each number allowing visitors to call the person using the online telephony service JaJah.

123people hopes to become a valuable resource for people trying to find individuals, but it suffers from a major drawback: finding people isn't so easy. The site will work extremely well for uncommon names, but searching for "John Smith" will yield too many results to make it useful unless the user knows who they're looking for. And chances are, if they already know the person, they probably won't find any reason to use the site.

Regardless, 123people has enjoyed some success in Europe and now that it's in the U.S., it hopes for similar results. The site is now open to all visitors and doesn't require registration.

People search engine Wink, the less bubbly but more filling competitor to Spock, is adding an interesting antilibel feature. Now, if you search for yourself on Wink and find a result you don't like, you can ask Wink to ignore it, and when other people search for you they won't see that result either.

You can delete feeds, results, and pictures from Wink search results.

It's a very useful feature--providing people are searching for you on Wink. While you can get that embarrassing party photo removed from the Wink results, it will still show up on Google. Wink CEO Michael Tanne makes two points regarding this. First, he says, about one third of the 3-billion-plus people searches done each month are now done on people search engines, with the other two-thirds split between general search engines and social networks. Wink is not a major force in people search yet, compared to online phone books, but it is making headway. Second, Wink results show up, to varying degrees, on general-purpose search engines. Tanne told me Wink results show up fairly reliably on Yahoo and that his team is working hard on Google optimization. So the upshot is, if you search for yourself on Wink and find a result or two you don't like, it's a good idea to "claim" your identity on the site and ask it to exclude those results. It can't hurt, and over time, it might help.

Wink also has some other new and interesting features. The most out there is a message board for people who haven't yet used the service. It works like this: Say you find an old friend via Wink, in a Web story or something, and you want to contact them. You can post a message to their name, and it will lie there waiting for them. If and when the person logs into Wink and claims their identity, they'll see your message. Tanne agrees this is a "last-resort" method for contacting people, but it's a clever idea and if Wink integrates with other social nets through OpenSocial, it could become a useful way to leave little message bombs around the Web for people you haven't communicated with in a while.

Finally, Wink now has a feature that lets you "friend" people and follow all their activies in a feed much like the Facebook "wall" and Plaxo's Pulse. By the way, Both Wink and Plaxo offer a widget that will you can use to tell people what you're doing online. Wink's only shows where you have accounts, though: Plaxo reports actual activity, such as Twitter updates.

Wink is working on an OpenSocial implementation, which could be very powerful. Conceptually, using Wink as an aggregation point for your social network activities makes a lot of sense. I'm curious to see what the crew comes up with.

My takeaway: Wink is worth using as a people search engine. It's also worth taking the time to claim your profile and edit out all the stuff about you that you don't like.

The PeekYou people search engine launched today in open beta. It's yet another site (see Wink and Spock) designed to help you find people.

Surely we can do better than this.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

If you're interested in this space, my recommendation is to use Wink. Spock is still in closed beta, and PeekYou's current beta is unimpressive. Despite the company's claim of 50 million people in the database, there are many duplicates (over 700 entries for George Bush, each with a few links--and typing George W. Bush doesn't work to narrow the results). And there's no good way to tell who's who in a list of similar names. Which of the seven Stephen Hawkings returned is the physicist? None of them, as it turns out (the one link tagged with a U.K. location goes to a fake MySpace page).

In searching for my own name (vanity, thy name is Blogger), I found links to an out-of-date personal blog, MySpace, and Ryze (a social network I haven't used since 2002), but nothing current. No Webware, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc.

PeekYou claims similar features to Spock and Wink: Users can "claim" their own profile and even make themselves unlisted. But my advice is to not get sucked into this product. It's barely ready for public access, and certainly not worth the time if you've got an important search to do.

We're also checking out Gleamd, an aggregator on comments about people, which is still in private beta.

The people search engine Spock is still in very private beta, but the doors opened up a crack this morning when a few more people were let in to the system, including me. Now that I've been able to play with the service, it's easy to see that Spock's creators are trying to build more than just a Google of people. Spock is also being built to map the relationships of people to each other.

Spock wants password access to your online contact lists.

This is made clear when beta users activate their invitation code. Spock asks you first for your personal connections: It wants you to provide a password to one system you use that has a personal address book. The options are LinkedIn, Plaxo, Hotmail, Gmail, AOL, or Yahoo. Spock does a one-time slurp from the contact list you give it. It says it uses the information so it can add your contacts to Spock, which is pretty cool and will make Spock look better to you, but by providing password access to your accounts, you're helping Spock get data it couldn't otherwise get from the public Web. In particular, you're providing not just names and data to fill out the Spock database, but also the connections between people.

As I said in my preview of Spock, I think the company is really building the framework for a social network, not just a search engine. Or perhaps, when it comes to databases of people, there's no clear difference.

Spock will find itself

(Credit: CNET Networks)

I'm still looking forward to the full release of Spock, partly because the company is putting so much work into solving the very thorny problem of resolving its database so different people with the same name are handled the right way. Other people-search technologies (see Wink) just punt on this, and display separate records for each hit on a name they find (example).

Spock's current beta is pretty rough, and the database is far from complete, especially for noncelebrities. The dodge of getting new users to populate the database is very clever, and it should help. It does creep me out, though. Let me put it this way: If you happened to be in my Plaxo database, how would you feel about me sending all the details that I have on you over to Spock?

See also: TechCrunch on the likely fortunes for three competing people search engines.

I got a chance to sit down with the founders of the people search engine, Spock, in advance of the company's grand unveiling, which will be during the LaunchPad sessions at the Web 2.0 Expo. Spock is Yet Another Search Engine, but it's an important one--it searches for people. You type in a name and it will show you everything it knows about that person and where it found the data. Or, if you search on a term, it will find people that match it. For example, search for "boxer," and Mohammad Ali shows up, not underpants or dogs.

It's a very useful idea, and the Spock team has gone further than just building a raw search engine. Each person gets his or her own page, and the system tags people. John Edwards is tagged U.S. Senate, among other things. Users can easily "rotate" on those tags, to see who else fits into that category--just like we do in Flickr, for example.

Spock finds people by name or attributes.

(Credit: Spock)

Users can also tag people manually, and vote on which tags are accurate and which are not. Likewise, if there are multiple photographs of a person attached to a record, users can vote on which one is best. (Finding videos for people records is on the road map, but won't be included at launch.) Spock's founders hope that using human input on top of computer-generated results will make for a quality search database.

It's too early to say, though, how good the results will be. The founders I met with, Jaideep Singh and Jay Bharti, said they'll have 100 million people in their database by launch. That's a lot, but there are 6 billion people on the planet, so it won't be the global White Pages for a while. Also, in our demo, the results were inconsistent. The founders attributed this to a server hiccup; and later in the demo results were much better.

Other interesting features: In Spock, users will be able to "claim" their own names, much like homeowners can claim their houses on Zillow. Authorization will be by proving you have access to one of your personal data sources, like a MySpace or LinkedIn page. Once you've claimed your name you can have ultimate authority over aspects of it, such as which picture displays, and you can add in your own data (like contact info) and decide who gets to see it. At some point, feature creep could make Spock into a de facto social network, although the founders adamantly claim that's not in their plan: they get data from the social networks, they say, they don't want to compete with them. But if Spock is successful, why wouldn't you start to use it to keep track of your friends, or post personal information, or try to find jobs through it?

We also foresee issues surrounding Spock identify theft. The founders say they're still working on some antispam and antigaming systems in the engine.

One of the coolest features we talked about (but did not see) is the system's capability to import your personal contact list--from Outlook or from your private contact list on a site like LinkedIn--and then perform searches against that list. The example we got: say you want to find which of your 2,000 Outlook contacts are golfers in San Francisco. Spock will be able to merge your list of names with its search results to tell you that. Pretty neat, if it works.

People pages pull data from numerous sources.

(Credit: Spock)

Spock will be compared to another people search tool, Wink. Wink is live, and Spock's just a demo, so you can't make a final comparison. But based on what we've seen, Spock's feature set does look much richer, and it also appears that Spock will do a better job of merging data from multiple sources into coherent records for individuals.

People are eagerly awaiting Spock's launch, so they can Spock themselves, their friends, and their ex-lovers (you know that's what you'll do first, too). We're going to have to wait, though. The site won't open up until sometime after the private beta begins, on April 16.

For another preview, see TechCrunch.