A Finland and US based company has put together a social discovery search engine for social media. That may sound like a mouthful, but the result, Whosin, is pretty cool for following the topics you like. Whosin allows you to drill down and save social media searches on your interests to find the most relevant and interesting results on your favorite topics. The service launched just three weeks ago and is still in early beta, but the concept is polished and accomplishes its goals.
When searching for a topic like Ice Hockey, the service grabs top tweets, photos, and video algorithmically, and displays them in an easy to break-down page. The results are also first sorted by location, making it easy to find posts relevant to you.
This isn’t just some one-way feed though. Whosin also allows users to share content directly to the platform, as well as comment on Whosin or tweet back to whoever originally tweeted the content. Whosin also lets users emotionally rate the post by topics like “fascinating,” “hilarious,” and “good to know.” You can also see what your friends have shared, and give reactions to their posts.
Very soon Whosin will offer a Facbook timeline integration, allowing you to also pull up posts from your friends from the topics that interest you. Further down the road, Whosin plans on offering shopping solutions as a way to monetize the platform, as well as give brands their own managed home pages where they can easily share tailored content and manage their image.
Currently they have over 1 million hashtags indexed, while still allowing users to add others as they see fit. I’m curious if users will embrace the social features on top of what is already social media, but at the very least it’s a great service if you ever find yourself wondering “I wonder what people are saying about Helsinki right now.
