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Who's Talkin' About Social Search?


These Guys Are

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.

WhosTalkin.com

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 "WebProNews" and find out who's talking about our beloved publication on Twitter or Facebook or Wordpress blogs, or many other places.

Searching Twitter for WebProNews on Whostalkin.com

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

 

About the author:
Chris Crum has been a part of the WebProNews team and the iEntry Network of B2B Publications since 2003.

4 Comments

Social search algorithms

Social search algorithms will definitely have their place in search the coming years. But I doubt they’ll perform much better than Google does right now.

Nice site!

I can see this site making in to my top 10 of sites I regularly visit. Thanks for bringing it to my attention. I couldn't currently find out how to set up an RSS feed though. Is that currently under development?

Chris, Thanks so much for

Chris,

Thanks so much for talking about WhosTalkin.com Just one small correction, 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

We are starting to talk a lot more about the line of WhosTalkin tools that are in development. Feel free to stop by our blog and check out our most recent post!

http://www.whostalkin.com/blog/beta-test/whats-to-come/

Thanks again!

RE: Chris, Thanks so much for

Hi Joe, Thanks for stopping by and providing this info. I'll update the article.

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