I recently received an email from Steinar Skipsnes letting me know about OthersOnline . This is is a new social service that matches people by their similar queries, as well as Web surfing habits and preferred interests. OthersOnline stands out from other social sites with its browser toolbar which enables the user to see who else is reading or interested in the topic or site that he’s currently looking at. For example, every time you search Google, you see the people who relate to those same keywords, plus their Web pages, and you can connect with them. A dropdown menu provides contact to their IM or email details, including a link to their profile. Contacts are split into global and local recommendations, based on the zip code in your profile. Friends can be added to a favorites list for easy contact at any time.

The Company positions itself as “Google for People”. Steinar writes me: “We bring you traffic. You know how businesses buy keywords on Google to promote themselves? Well, that’s what we’re doing for people/bloggers, only it’s free.”

OthersOnline will run contextual ads based on its users Web browsing history, and promises partnering companies a chance to build their brand by retaining contact even when users have clicked away from their site. See for more info.

Marshall Kirkpatrick writes:

“Will this work? I don’t know, but it’s interesting. Will strangers seek each other out based on common surfing habits? Will this turn into just another space for a large number of men to harrass a large number of women and and a small number of women with webcams to go nuts? If multiple people could communicate at the same time like a perma-IRC, if users could see who was on a page in real time or if other community discourse was possible then this might strike me as more likely to take off. But that’s just my take on it personally; there may be a simple beauty with enough safeguards to make this mass market viable.”

I agree with Marshall that it would be really cool if multiple people could communicate at the same time and especially if users could see who was on a page in real-time. However, I do know that OthersOnline is currently working on improving its service. Steinar tells me that they’ve got a couple of large deals lined up which will result in significant keyword-based exposure for their users, and a lot more new users.

I also spoke to Jordan Mitchell from the Company who told me another scoop: Soon OthersOnline will have reports that show you exactly how much exposure you’re getting from them. Think of it as your own personal ad campaign.

Here’s a screenshot of how it will look:

They are also currently working on improving their registration process to make it simpler and more intuitive. The reporting system and new registration process should be up in the next two weeks and they plan to officially launch their service in mid-September.

Spock which publicly launched August 8th, is a new people search engine, helping users find and discover other people on the Web. It was founded by Jaideep Singh (CEO) and Jay Bhatti (VP Product) and received $7 million in financing from Clearstone Venture Partners and Opus Capital Ventures, months before the beta service was even planned to launch.

As Catherine Holahan from BusinessWeek writes:

“A Google search for an individual may return tens of thousands of links in milliseconds. But it won’t display a concise summary of all the information available on the Web about that person, such as her occupation, her interests and hobbies, her age, marital status, where she’s from, and what she looks like. That’s where Bhatti’s company, Spock, comes in. His people search engine, scheduled for launch in July, is one of the dozens of niche endeavors trying to capture some of the more than $60 billion projected to be spent on search marketing over the next four years.”

Spock’s focus is on people. The only kind of search results you get is a list of people. So for example, if you search for republicans or sushi or bloggers, the results will be lists of people associated with your search. The algorithm is probably based on the page rank or frequency analysis algorithm used by Google - but tailored to people.

Spock also uses tags in a very unique way. The spock robot automatically creates tags for any person it finds. It gathers information on people from Wikipedia, and social networking sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook. However Spock also lets users add tags of their own, and vote existing tags up or down to strengthen the associations between people and topics. Spock leverages a combination of automated tags and people power for tagging. Individuals can claim their own page, and clearly each one of us has an interest in doing that.

A unique kind of tag in Spock is called ‘relationships’, and it’s what connects people together. For example, Chelsea is related to Clinton because she is his daughter, but Bush is related to Clinton because he is the successor to the title of President. These relationships are shown on Spock and taken together, they weave an intricate web of connections between people.

Spock also lets people vote on the existing “facts” (tags/relationships) and it re-arranges information to reflect the votes. However, you should know that the system is not yet tuned to do this correctly all the time.

It will be interesting to see how Spock balances people’s desire to manage their own image with the public data the search engine finds. It will also be very interesting to see how Spock manages spamming of tags, websites associated with people, and other user-contributed data.

As Michael Arrington writes:

“People search is a space that went from nowhere to crowded, fast. Wink changed direction and launched a people search product last November. Also in this space is Streakr, ProfileLinker, LinkedIn, ZoomInfo and Upscoop. Unlike the others (for the most part), Spock goes way beyond searching just social networks for people information. They are positioning themselves specifically against Google for web search and Amazon for product search, saying the third important type of search is information about people, and that 30% of Internet searches are people-related. Wink is Spock’s closest competitor among all of the ones listed above.”

While testing the site myself,  I found its results to be quite accurate and I enjoyed the user-friendly interface. With an estimated 20 billion search queries about people done per month, Spock is positioning itself to dominate the people search space. This is definitely a product and a company to watch.