Wink Launches Social Network Search for MySpace, Bebo, LinkedIn
Wink, the social search engine, has evolved beyond recognition since I first reviewed it over a year ago. The site began by offering a web search that let you rate and tag the results - the idea was that you could find …
Context & Ripple Effects
Wink started out more than a year ago as a web search where users rated and tagged results, per Mashable's original review; the pivot announced here turns it into a dedicated search layer over public profiles on MySpace, Bebo, and LinkedIn. The move lands at an awkward moment for the biggest target: MySpace was described in January 2006 as the default daily hangout for virtually every American teen and twentysomething, yet by late October 2006 coverage was already reporting teens like Jackie Birnbaum calling it 'so last year' and moving on.
That mix — one network at peak scale but showing churn, one (Bebo) strongest with younger users, one (LinkedIn) built around professional identity — is what makes a cross-network index interesting: whoever aggregates profile search sits between users and the networks' own internal discovery tools.
First-order effects
- People hunting for someone across networks can query MySpace, Bebo, and LinkedIn profiles from one place instead of searching each site's own box, including professional identities on LinkedIn exposed to general-purpose searchers.
- The three networks lose first-party control over how their members' profiles surface in discovery, since Wink's index now mediates a slice of profile traffic.
Second-order effects
- Each network faces the crawler dilemma: tolerate Wink's indexing as free member discovery, or restrict it and push those queries back inside the walled garden — with Bebo and LinkedIn having very different privacy tolerances than MySpace.
- A cross-network people-search category invites fast followers; any traction by Wink pressures other engines and startups to treat the public social graph as crawlable infrastructure rather than proprietary territory.
Third-order effects
- If profile aggregation holds, the locus of competition shifts from owning a social network to owning the index of all of them — a structural tension between open search and walled-garden discovery that will shape how much of the social graph stays publicly addressable.
- Given documented teen churn away from even the dominant network within a single year, aggregator value depends on tracking users as they migrate between services, making durable cross-network coverage, not any one partnership, the moat.
The trend: Search is pushing past documents into people, treating public social-network profiles as a new crawlable corpus that the networks themselves would prefer to keep behind their own search boxes.