Wink Roundup: Microformats, Life Streams, and More

Wink is adding new features to its service more quickly since adjusting the focus to people search it seems. Here’s a roundup of new features.

Recent Changes

1. Microformats: The Wink developers have started formatting user profiles and search results as hCards. Well done, though maybe also add XFN values to the Friends page? Would be grand! Anyway, after Wink started supporting MicroID about a month ago it is encouraging to see support for Microformats as well. Simple but powerful technologies rule.
2. Yahoo 360° and Twitter: Both networks have been added to the list of networks which can be searched when looking for family and friends.
3. Favourites: Search results – that’s the people you were looking for – can be added to your Favourites and also be tagged. Good idea as I certainly don’t want to search the same people time and again.

Life Streams

Life streams have been added to Wink last night and make its focus on people more complete now. Though Wink isn’t just displaying your own activities on the web but also those of your friends and contacts. The stream consists of all the feeds your friends have added to their Wink profile.

Though if you don’t want to follow all of your friends’ activities you can simply click the Don’t follow link. So if you want to be informed about your friends’ bookmarks on Ma.gnolia but not about their blurbs on Twitter you can just do that.

Your own activities look similar; you can see them on your profile page. However there is something wrong with my Google Link Blog. The RIA story is attributed to Niall Kennedy, though it has been published by Alex Iskold on Read/Write Web. Maybe it’s Google’s problem, maybe Wink’s. I don’t know.

The profile page has been re-designed a little bit as well, e.g. you can see all visitors to your profile page; looks similar to the MyBlogLog widget, I think.

Also Wink is a finalist in the Webware 100 (Data category). Nice one.

Disclosure: I did a little bit of beta testing for Wink’s widget (hey, and I even have a tee now). Not much more connection to them; I just like Wink, I guess.