Preparing for the Public Beta

We’ve been working away for the last few months, getting feedback from our beta users (thank you so much!) and refining the Wink experience. As the public beta approached we gave accounts to the rest of the people who’d requested them so they could try it out. We’ve also given people the ability to invite up to 5 friends.

This is early, and there are still lots of bugs, but we hope you like it. Let us know what you think. We will be posting a list of known bugs as soon as the dust settles.

Some people might say “What exactly does Wink search?” Our thinking is that people who are frequent users of del.icio.us, digg and slashdot, who get their information from many sources, and who count on knowing what people are finding interesting right now - those people would like one place to search all those sources. Google and Yahoo are great for the whole Web, and we’ve integrated Google search into our service, but the Wink results - those are a measure of what people are thinking right now, based on their bookmarks and tagging.

Key features include:

• A big update to the user interface
• Improvements to the search relevance algorithms
• “Recently Discovered” that are constantly updated to show what’s new at del.icio.us, digg, Yahoo MyWeb, Slashdot, Furl
• “Sync Tags” so our users can use their del.icio.us tags while searching Wink, and send any new favorites discovered back to del.icio.us
• “Wink Answers” that shows community generated information about 1.5 M subjects - these are from Wikipedia and link to Wikipedia for the full entry, but are editable by our users.

We hope you enjoy Wink, and look forward to hearing from you.

Cheers,
Michael

Tags: Wink, search

21 December 2005 | beta, Wink | Comments