Zero Fun #3 - People Search
For the third installment of my re-visiting of “web2.0″ sites I signed up for but never bothered to use much more than a day, we take on the concept of “people search”. Unlike a few other new things, I was immediately skeptical of this concept. I mean, what the hell does “people search” mean, anyhow, and exactly who thinks they can beat Google at the search game? Not that Google is unbeatable, mind you. But I wouldn’t exactly call it difficult to find out something about someone online using their search box.
Still, others have tried. Whether or not they’ve failed, I leave to you:
Wink
I’m guessing this is an aggregation site of all the various places I post stuff, where the idea is to kick out a “life stream” of me. Maybe. Hell if I remember. That’s what it shows about me, but damned if I know what that has to do with anyone anywhere finding me.
Gleamd
Here’s a site I never got, not from the beginning. It looked like some sort of popularity engine, but I could never figure out what it was trying to be. Biggest failing: anyone can set up a profile on anyone, and normalizing the data is a nightmare. No, not a nightmare, just impossible.
If there’s positive applications to these two, let me know. Profiles are still there. Maybe I’m slow and it will eventually set in.
This entry was posted on Sunday, January 13th, 2008 at 6:37 pm and is filed under Zero Fun. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
on January 14, 2008 at 1:47 pm Jason Penney wrote:
I actually use Wink on occasion, and I even searched for you there when I first tried it out.
My understanding is that Wink lets you search for “John Smith” and you get a list of “John Smith”s, each one should be a different person. When you click on a specific “John Smith” you get a bunch of hits that should all be the same “John Smith”. Or at least that’s how it used to work. Looking at it now, it does seem to be a rather crappy “Life Stream” view by default (I ended up writing my own one of those). The “Places” tab is what I was talking about.
It’s good for tying stuff together, sort of. Probably not so useful for “Evo Terra”. I’m pretty sure when I see that name who it is. “Jason Penney” on the other hand is not always me.