Wink, a place to flirt — and prowl

Wink, the social search engine that searches for Web pages that people have bookmarked, tagged or otherwise marked as interesting, has introduced a people search.

You click the people tab (see screenshot below), and you get results from three leading social networks, Bebo, LinkedIn and MySpace. You can filter by gender, age, and dating status — and you can see where this is headed.

This is a good move by LinkedIn to highlight its people search, because we’ve mentioned how Spock is coming after them soon. (Update: Turns out, LinkedIn had nothing to do with this – Wink crawled and indexed all publicly available LinkedIn profiles).

Great for flirting. But also convenient for older men on MySpace, known to prowl — and one reason for the surprising find that there’s so many older people using that site. Wink, of course, makes this even easier for the creeps, and it’s not like someone can opt out of being searched. (Update: Matthew Stotts provides a link to some helpful advice on this). VentureBeat editor “Matt Marshall” is No. 1 of 4,885 Matt Marshalls (we’re stopping the criticism), and I’m not even on Bebo yet — plus I apparently enjoy the luxury of anonymity (no picture).

Our first big mention of Wink was here.