And we have yet another search engine entering the fray. Looks like some bright bulbs decided to combine social tagging a la del.icio.us, Flickr, and CiteULike with the joys of Google. And thus was born Wink, which just opened as a beta site. (They also have a development blog with more history, etc.)
It seems like a nice enough idea, but it’s not clear to me why people are going to invest the time and energy necessary to make it work. Social tagging and recommender systems like this live or die on the willingness of a significant number of people to invest at least a little in the building and maintenance of the tags. Given how damnedly useful Google is in its unadorned state, I just don’t see a high percentage of users making that investment. Some probably will, but my money says that it won’t be enough to take off.
That said, they did point me at GRIN (GReat Images in NASA), which is a pretty darn cool collection. So we’ll all have to wait and see…
