New Wink Updates: Leave Messages on the Web

It has been a little bit quiet about people search engine Wink recently. Though last night Wink has been overhauled and results are really good, I think. Information is more structured which makes it rather easy to gather most of it with just a glance.

Information

First you will see recent activities of your friends, or let’s call it more buzzword friendly a lifestream. It’s similar to the mini feed most readers know from Facebook. People have full control of the kind of information you are able see in that feed, though; e.g. see their Ma.gnolia bookmarks but not their Digg stories.

Clicking on the profile link you’ll see an overview of your own activities, your other online places, and a list of your friends. There are tabs provided for those views, so you can navigate easily between them.

Contacting People

The real cool feature is the way you are able to contact other people. Of course, you can invite them to join Wink as well. That’s no problem but let’s assume you have found old classmates on another social network by a search on Wink but you are hesitant to invite them because you haven’t been in touch for many years. Now you can just leave them a message on Wink although they aren’t members yet. If they join Wink someday and claim their profiles they will see your message and can reply to it. Considering that Wink supports Google’s OpenSocial this might be a resonable way to get in touch with people. Rafe Needleman at Webware has a good summary of that feature:

…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.

It looks like this:

I searched for the wonderful Silke aka paulinepauline and among other results I found her LinkedIn profile. In the dropdown menu I can choose to contact her and leave a message. I actually did that later on.

Cool isn’t, it?

Summary

All in all the update makes a lot of sense. Especially the way to contact other people looks well interesting, though only Wink’s use of OpenSocial will prove if it works well. I am sorry to see that hCards are not part of people’s profiles anymore. Wink implemented them earlier this year which made a lot of sense in my opinion. Though I can’t discover them anymore. I want them back! At least MicroID’s are still there.