WhosTalkin is a new search engine for the social media landscape. It searches across 40+ popular social media applications, providing in depth results not usually seen in the mainstream search engines. In their own words:
WhosTalkin.com is a social media search tool that allows users to search for conversations surrounding the topics that they care about most. Whether it be your favorite sport, favorite food, celebrity, or your company's brand name; Whostalkin.com can help you join in on the conversations that you care about most.
Joe Hall asked me to beta test the system and aside from a few minor issues my first impressions are very positive.
The Interface and Controls
Top marks for making this simple and intuitive. Steve Krug would approve. My first choices are limited to a single search box, which gathers results from all their sources.
You can then drill down results by each source, listed on the left. These range from Twitter, Technorati to Bloglines and YouTube. Simple enough. My only complaint here would be the need to operate two scrollbars, one for the menu and another for the results. Even with the site at full screen, the design is limited by a fixed height. It would be good if scrolling could be limited to one controller only.
The Results
A quick vanity search on "Nick Wilsdon" produced 210 results. Although I monitor this search in Google Alerts, there were several new results for me here. To be fair to Google Alerts, my free account only returns results to a certain depth.
WhosTalkin should have an advantage over GoogleAlerts by querying the sites direct, but this advantage will depend entirely on the quality of each API. If they manage to provide a more comprehensive picture without charging, it will do very well. Clearly this could become another useful tool for ORM monitoring.
Other Features
The WhosTalkin team are considering or already working on a range of paid subscription services to compliment the free system. On their list are plugins for WordPress, iGoogle and Firefox. The must-have function for me is RSS feeds for selected searches.
With a hat tip towards my industry collegue Brian Carter, adding feeds from WhosTalkin.com and Google Alerts into your iGoogle desktop would make an excellent D.I.Y. monitoring tool.
Overall this is an excellent mash-up and will prove useful to anyone monitoring their online reputation. There's still room in the market for ORM search engines, provided they return better results than their competitors. WhosTalkin.com seems to be succeeding on this point.
You can follow the progress of WhosTalkin on their blog. They don't have a launch date at the moment, beyond "very soon" but Joe is open to beta test requests on the system.
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