Chris Meller

Tom Simpson sent me an early Christmas present that I’ve really appreciated: an invite to the Wink beta program.

I wanted to give it a week for some actual testing before I wrote any kind of review, so here goes:

Thus far, Wink looks like it has a lot of potential. Not only can I “bookmark” links and tag them, a lot like del.icio.us, but at the same time I’m helping to contribute to the community-accessible search engine that is more relevent to what people like me are looking for.

I have seen a few random errors, mainly involving retrieving items based upon my tags, but they’ve all been fixed within a few short moments. (One was a PHP error about a function which did not exist. No doubt I simply caught them during an update.)

Unfortunately, one major problem I have with the service is their “Recently Discovered” list. In the list you can click an item to mark it as a “favorite” (ie: tag and bookmark). It throws a small Ajax popup that asks you to tag the item, then reloads the page as the item is added to your personal page. Unfortunately, during the tagging and reload process, many new “Recently Discovered” items can be added to this list, pushing the point you’d read to far down, even onto seperate pages.

Often times, even if not tagging anything, by the time you click over to view page 2 of the list, page 1 will have been replaced with new content, leaving you where you started: the same content that was on your page 1 is now page 2.

There’s also presently no way to filter what is displayed in this list. There have been times when I’ve seen 2 full pages of Chinese / Japanese / etc. characters which mean nothing to me. Coming up with some method for only displaying “English” results would be greatly appreciated.

Another request: Sort the “Recently Discovered” list by tags, since everything is added with some default tags as it’s pulled from various sources around the web.

Some more eventual additions that would be nice perks to increase useablility: a Firefox extension that pulls your Wink items into a tagged bookmarks list for easy access. An auto-tagging option would also be greatly appreciated, since a lot of things I’m tagging feature key tag words in their titles.

Other than that, I think Wink is off to a great start. I’ve used it for several tech-related searches (a plugin for Wordpress, a program for OS X, a GPO hack for Active Directory, etc.), and the accuracy has been astounding. I think it’s definitely in the running to replace Google for some of my typical tech-related searches.