Oh, the worldwide web. It’s vast. It’s huge. It’s hard to find what you’re looking for sometimes. You’re left wishing someone, or something, could just do all the work for you. Well, TinkoMatic hopes to be that something. A new service that’s launched this week, TinkoMatic lets you define the parameters of your search and will alert you when it finds what you are looking for.
In private beta since March, TinkoMatic is a dual-ended search tool covering deals and jobs. Once you’ve told TinkoMatic what it is you’re looking for, it will scour the web until it finds it. There are typically immediate search results of some sort available immediately, granting access to multiple site results at once. TinkoMatic searches Craig’s List, Oodle, eBay and Etsy to name a few, giving a wide range of results that are likely to suit your shopping and job hunt needs.
Features include the ability to track multiple items across various sites and locations, with new listings as they periodically become available. TinkoMatic also has Facebook Connect integration, giving a social spin on the niche search tool. There is also the ability to share search results, which means you are able to better track items and manage your online search.
Results can be shared across the social web, with Facebook and Twitter links beside each search query response. The options for personalizing the search results are delineated by whichever site TinkoMatic provides in your search query. Updates can be streamed through RSS, unyoking you from the actual TinkoMatic site.
There are several other sites that offer similar services, especially when it comes to the offering of a search that spans multiple classifieds sites. However, its launch presents a renewed interest in the personalized search capabilities abandoned by many others in the past year, especially after the economy’s downturn effected the amount of funding available for such sites.
Yet a growing trend of concierge tools has been made possible with the popularity of smart phones and their application platforms, breathing new life and new necessity for such personalized services. What this means is that the sub-economy provided by the mobile marketplace and the furthered integration of social networking platforms has the ability to support services such as TinkoMatic.
I personally think TinkoMatic has a ways to go before it becomes an effective and highly usable search tool. This is in part due to the fact that third party sites can be limiting in providing access to their databases for the purpose of search through a centralized service.
As I have previously mentioned, I think the concierge applications will continue to rise in popularity, especially as they are made more accessible through partnerships and integration with established services and hubs already used by a wide range of consumers. This provides value to consumers by way of recommendations and personalized search results, giving them remote and continued access to the sites they would frequent on an individual basis.