WhosTalkin.com has launched to the public after residing in private beta for 7 months. What’s WhosTalkin.com you ask? It’s a social media search engine that allows users to search across a number of social networking sites, blogs, news sites, forums, etc. And it’s pretty cool.
For those of you who actually are familiar with it, WhosTalkin has made the following changes:
– New design and logo.
– Improved the sorting algorithm to organize by freshness and source.
– Developed a URL API to allow third party developers and applications to tie in.
– Added around 15 new services that we aggregate data from, putting our total over 60!
While it still has some work ahead of it, the site appears to be a pretty solid first step toward searching a web that is getting more social by the day. “The problem is that social media is far more dynamic than the Web of yesteryear. And, unfortunately, WhosTalkin is only good for searching while you’re on the site,” says Rick Turoczy at Read Write Web.
“None of the pages are URL addressable – meaning you can’t save or bookmark searches that you perform on a regular basis. Also disconcerting is the fact that there is no obvious RSS feed or alert mechanism to ping users when new results are found. And since the pages aren’t URL addressable, it’s impossible to run a service like Dapper against them to create your own RSS feeds,” adds Turoczy.
I can almost see WhosTalkin as a reputation management tool as much as a search engine. For example, I can do a search for “Murdok” and find out who’s talking about our beloved publication on Twitter or Facebook or WordPress blogs, or many other places.
The web needs a go to place(s) for searching social sites easily, although this task will likely only get more difficult as every website and its mother adds social elements, and data portability increases in popularity. Still, I hear Google is looking for new acquisitions.
UPDATE: Joe Hall from WhosTalkin notes a correction in the comments:
We do offer dynamic URLs through our URL API. For example if you wanted to search for “cats” the url would be:
http://www.whostalkin.com/veiwer.php?q=cats
