With a plethora of social networks for everyone from knitters to dog lovers, managing our increasing number of long tail profiles is a huge pain. The problem of managing a fragmented identity has been attacked two ways: creating a new master account (OpenID), aggregating identity through search (Spock, Wink), or aggregating management of all your accounts on one site. The latter solution has attracted quite a bit of attention with sites like Profilactic, ProfileLinker, and Loopster.
ProfileBuilder is another startup looking to help solve the identity problem by providing one place to manage your personal information. They gave party goers a sneak peek of their identity management tool at the TC 9 party at August Capital. During the beta preview, approximately 5,000 profiles have been created, and ProfileBuilder has received more than 450,000 page views. Now the site has launched to the public.
ProfileBuilder isn’t just about getting friend status updates or single login access, but more about easily controlling what information shows up on what sites. However, they do have an API that allows anyone to build a program to push updates from your profile to other social networking services. The service creates a master profile where you can catalog your biography, photos, links to other services, blogs, and even create new kinds of information pages. You can expose this information to people across the net through an embeddable badge (like 
). When you place the badge on a site, ProfileBuilder knows and lets you choose what type of information gets exposed through the embed on that site. You can manage all your embeds through their website.
Encouraging people to use the service by embedding profiles across the web is no doubt a first step in toward serving as a total online identity solution. Plaxo has been gunning for this distinction as well, and certainly more companies will want to serve as the focal point for identity on the web.
Disclosure: ProfileBuilder is a TechCrunch20 sponsor.
Spelling error in your title…might want to fix it.
Don’t forget about the social network for sleeping and waking up your friends!
There is a need to tie all of these social networks together. I wish them luck.
A suggestion for Techcrunch, I will like it better if links in an article takes me to the website rather than crunchbase page. May be you can keep crunchbase links in bracket or at the end of article.
Just another rung in the ladder toward profile providers and content providers. The proliferation of social networks will have to fall-out at some point and the split will have to allow some of these companies to survive by taking a side.
Yusuf: You’re pissing in the wind there.
Here at SocialURL we’ve been addressing the very same things and in development of similar protocals. I’ve spoken to TechCrunch employees and there must be some favoritism taking place there to just mentioning “Profilactic, ProfileLinker, and Loopster” when none of these have the traction we have at SocialURL (even without the help of TechCrunch).
Hey nick,
I have been following identity solutions from some time. There was an initiative at Sun called sunone some years ago. Today these applications come in many flavors:
1. Enterprise editions if you use Oracle for example.
2. Operating system embedded like Apple’s Keychain.
3. In the browser like Firefox.
Now you tell us that there is another flavor, Web 2.0. For some reason I do not see it working. I consider to be very personal all the identity management that it is actually awkward to go to a site and register all your passwords and user names. Also the advantage of a desktop (browser or OS) in our computer is friendlier than a site as a portal.
The one time I see it working is for people without a laptop and mobility.
Mario Ruiz
@ http://www.oursheet.com
Embedding a badge is rather useless, since a lot of sites don’t support embedding javascript or images, just text.
A smart app in this space needs to be able to push updates out to people’s profiles using the natural profile format of the site. This could definitely be done with webscraping/automatic posting, but it would be nice if there was a common API for this.
Nice url though, profil.es.
Ah, I misinterpreted the site. This is Yet-Another-Profile-Aggregator, rather than way to build and push common profiles out to multiple sites.
Hot tip: they should implement lifestreaming so you can see the latest updates from any of the tabs.
Interesting that the embedded badge leads me to a site that displays “Error connecting to db”. Maybe this is a bit more “Alpha” than “Launch”?
Yeah, engtech
I see javascript as a problem for people interested in embedding on myspace. So far there are still a lot of sites that allow for JS embeds still. We’ll see how the security issues play out.
Mario,
I see identity tied to these new social websites different from enterprise level solutions because those are more like authentication control. These sites are more just about managing the flow of public personal information.
Now I’ve heard everything. The site for the totally SN-addicted. What we really need is “Life Builder”, a site for all these social network addled people to figure out how to get lives!
Isn’t this three ways? :’D
I count three…nice use of the colon ‘:’ though
To Joe T. Let’s face it, a large percentage of social network users just want to amass large numbers of beautiful people that they can invite to be their “friends”. ProfilePilot.com is still very much in beta but aims to satisfy this desire. Browse hot profiles, tag them Web 2.0 style, and rate them like hot-or-not. Site is quite slow and has some interface issues…but I guess that’s what beta is all about.
Damn that p looks awful similar to our planypus favicon
I’ll be keeping an eye on these guys.
I’ve been writing about the new illness of Social Network Fatigue for some time and only recently are we starting to see people address this problem.
It’s also encouraging to see that OpenID being put forward, because if anyone has the means / infrastructure to sort this problem out, it’s these guys…
So to solve the problem of too many sites having profiles for them, they add another one accomplishing the same thing, with less features than facebook.
Why bother…?