Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Yahoo and now Google. What do these have in common? If you’re reading this blog, you probably have a profile on all of them. And those are just the obvious ones, you probably have a bunch of other profiles on a series of other networks too. The situation has become untenable.
Imagine if you wanted to update one piece of information on all of them — like I recently had to do with a job change. That’s a lot of work for such a minor tweak. But if you don’t do it across the board, there will be incorrect information about you out there on the web. Information that is always just a search away.
Sure, there are calls for profile standards, and even some services that promise to update your information across multiple networks in one fell swoop — but let’s be honest, the only way you’re ever going to get a unified profile, is if one of the aforementioned services gets so big that it becomes the de-facto standard. Facebook is getting closer to that than anyone else with over 250 million users and rising, but Google may have well as have taken a crowbar to its knees today.
By adding its own profiles to search results on Google for names, Google has created yet another profile that we need to maintain. While that’s good for Google — Google Profiles have been around for a while, but no one used them — it’s more work for us, and seems to all but ensure that one network will not rule them all.
And we can all say that we’re going to drop all networks besides the one we use the most, but we won’t. For most people, the social graph is different on each of them, and there’s some reason to stick around there. If nothing else, it’s more of a pain to remove yourself from a service than it is just not to update your profile anymore. I can’t even begin to imagine how many profiles I have out there that haven’t been updated in a year or more.
And even if we did drop all our networks but one, another hot new network would rise up and we’d all sign up for it, renewing the cycle. Just look at Twitter. Everyone is now signing up for it, and while it doesn’t have a robust profile right now, it probably will at some point.
And services like Facebook Connect offer the promise of transferring your profile information to other services, but do you think Google is going to use that? I don’t think so. Why would it? It has a competing product it’s trying to push with Google Friend Connect. And it can act as nice at it wants, say the right things in public, and add links to Facebook under your Google Profile result, but do you really think Google wants Facebook winding up as the one profile you maintain? No. And vice versa.
And so we remain at a stand still. It’s one of those situations where, while competition may not be a bad thing, it can be a frustrating thing. I wonder how long until we see Yahoo add profiles to its search results? And maybe Microsoft will further its relationship with Facebook to add limited profile information from there to its queries. It’s already a mess, and it’s going to get worse before it gets better — if it ever does.
Update: As Google’s Kevin Marks notes in the comments, Google did try to use Facebook data with Friend Connect, before it was blocked almost a year ago. Of course, Friend Connect would basically negate the need for a lot of what Facebook Connect does, so what we have here are competing platforms, and a stand-off — like I said above.
[photo: flickr/andrew mason]
first!
eat shit, dumbass
Places lived till date is the feature missing in facebook. Facebook is stuck back in time in their search, they dont search more info fields, though they lately made fan-page keywords available for match in google. Now facebook’s turn to improve its search, especially include places/sub-places lived by making fixed set(country/state/district/city) – not user generated places – and then including it in search..
Linked in is living with SEO juice. And goog is using search monopoly to promote this new product – clear antitrust – not showing competitive product links. But google will never make this to novice users, only savvy users will make this profile.
I can’t believe how hilarious the first comment and first response are. Kudos to you sirs, for semi-ruining this very thought provoking read… with a good laugh.
Asshats rule asshammers, so I’ve heard.
come on, employment change a minor tweak?
its not.
a new strategy, contact info, corporate direction, product line, competitor landscape, and more.
unless you’re not committed to your employer, in which case a “tweak” might be to change employees?
if you think it’s that minor, run your own system, SEO it, and problem solved. except no one would list you in the top-100 results.
there is a site to maintain your social resume … pretty good site … you can pick up the best from your social profiles like facebook, picasa, flickr, youtube, docstoc, slideshare, twitter, linkedin to create your profile … + you can upload your traditional resume …
they give u a single link which you can share with ur employers … and there is only one place to update your resume …
And there is a good one for your professional resume. So no matter where you apply, you can use the same centralized, definitive resume that you can selectively make available to companies you are interested in, through which ever means you apply.
No more having to worry about multiple outdated and inconsistent resumes floating around.
Why, I can create my profile here and Google will find it:
Name: Catherine Dumbaz
Birth: 23. 2. 1989, Ontario, CA
Profession: flower arranger
Place: 81, South Main, Granville, Ohio
Motto: IHS
Nothing is a minor tweak as far as maintaining a social profile is concerned. Be it just updating “five things I cannot live without” on Orkut or about me on Facebook, it involves a series of actions, more so if you have more accounts or are into more networks.
Also, there is this tendency to reach a saturation point and leave the whole thing un-updated. But this is just a temporary resolve. We cannot forget our favorite social networks for a long time. They have almost become an inherent part of our lives – like a daily ritual/routine. If not actively participating in them, we want to be in the “know” of things about friends. And when we see them active, we cannot resist the temptation to show (prove?) that we are ALIVE and plunge into social networking again.
Indeed, social profiling is as you say, is a cycle that renews itself time and again. Wish there was one network updating which we can update all. (But again, there will always be an another, better to that “one”… we can’t simply help it).
Ok, i’m sorry about the above I just had to do it. Never had before and figure i couldn’t help myself. I’m now officially an online DB. Sorry everyone, may the useful comments resume.
Good post MG.
Google is using FB Connect. It’s on YouTube.
Sometime back I wrote on there is a need for Social profiling/ policing/ governing service which will be needed by Enterprises. Many might disagree at this point, but that might be because we are not ready to adopt it.
http://www.blog...ial-policing-2/
There are several sites which are working on give people the ability to keep all their profiles in one place. I have to check my bloglines for the exact article but I read about it last year. That’s how I found out about Naymz or whatever. The internet is now so big, that when people write something many times they think they are covering something new, but it’s not the case. They just didn’t see the previously written report which in many cases goes into greater detail.
Something that nobody as of yet has thought of will come along and take care of this problem. It will sneak upon us all within the next few years, headed by someone who is 16 years old right now. And hence the cycle will continue.
That day has come. The Validize solution (www.validize.com) provides a verified profile- name, contact information, employment, and professional credentials that could be used across the web in a form of a secure badge. Think SSL for people. Why have profiles that others might question? In addition, Validize actively monitors the users’ verified information and automatically update any new findings so the user doesn’t have to. An API will be available to any site or online service that wants to use the Validize solution to display the secure badge. Validize is the standard for verified digital identity can be use with any opensource, commercial, and proprietary web applications and platforms.
Private beta starting now for any site using Drupal, Wordpress, MovableType as the platform. Additional platforms will be available in the coming months.
When Google launched Friend Connect, it included Facebook Profiles. It wasn’t Google that removed them. Check your assumptions.
Fair enough Kevin. I’ll update to include your guys’ spat from almost a year ago. But what’s happened in the mean time? Not a lot. I’m sure you won’t place the blame squarely on Facebook — you guys have competing products, and I think that’s fine from a business perspective. But as a user, it’s frustrating. Google could implement Facebook Connect for its profiles could it not? Any plans to do so? Would love to hear about it
What’s happened in the meantime has been a huge amount of progress on common standards for the social web, including OpenID, OAuth, Portable Contacts and the many implementations of OpenSocial now available. Read http://bit.ly/OSqa for a fairly recent overview. We all continue to work on converging open specifications to enable interoperation, with Activity Streams being a big area of focus at the moment. All of us – Google, Facebook, MySpace, Yahoo, Hi5, 51.com, Ning, LinkedIn, AOL, Netlog, Mixi, Twitter and many more are working together to agree and implement these specifications and standards.
No disrespect Kevin – but as the saying goes, I’ll believe it when I see it.
And just to follow up: I’ll be happy as hell if you prove me wrong.
Sad tactics by goog. Only bloggers will beleive, and some blind MS haters – definitely not any court. Yahoo included profile images from facebook, which was the way to go. Facebook has more than 50% market share in profile search, and goog is excluding it from first page of search results.
Sadly, goog wont win, nor anybody else. It is only users who lose.
Reminds me of the IM market from back in the day. Everyone knew that users wanted interoperability between AIM/MSN/Y!, but no one wanted the commoditization of the profile.
In the end, no one makes money on IM alone. Perhaps social sites should learn from that.
I’m not on the Internet to be social. i came to be a USER.
i am a computer user, since 1979,
So, we need…what, a standardized protocol? Maybe something with XML?
I’m going to be typo check guy with this comment. In your last paragraph, you want to clean up:
“…it’s can be a frustrating thing.”
Otherwise, good stuff, I’ve had similar thoughts and agree: it’ll get worse. And the “better” part is too far out into the future to know what it looks like.
Thx Bob.
Googl profiles are cool. Lots of Potential. they should move them to the top of the results.
huge market for professional social search location based destinations. custom profile offerings is the next wave of social networking innovation.
SocialLocator.com – promote yourself
But Google doesnt manipulate results… does it Siegler?
Not really sure what you’re asking.
Was just trying to reply for this statement “Googl profiles are cool. Lots of Potential. they should move them to the top of the results.”
Agree with Balaji. Exclude competitor and move it to the top of results. First page in search results is virtually top among thousands.
I repeat, net users are losers out of this.
net users are losers, and goog wont mind.
I agree with you. Google Profiles are really cool stuff. The presentation is also clean and neat (as always it is with G) and above all, there is lack of clutter like in other sites.
Its funny how most of these companies are starting to use the same practices and methods that they all blamed Microsoft for using. Everyone was angry at Microsoft for “not playing nice” with others and now everyone else is doing it.
The issue has nothing to do with playing nice. It has to do with the fact that each of these services is free and lives off of advertising. Therefore, the less traffic you get to your site, the less ad revenue you bring it. So why would Google use facebook’s connect? By doing so, it will lose ad revenue. The same goes for all of them.
Once you get past the basic need to generate revenue, it makes sense. Especially in Google’s case. It also shows the arrogance of these companies since they promised interaction and openness.
The funny thing is that when it comes to interoperability, Microsoft and Yahoo are the market leaders. These companies share profiles when it comes to their IM platforms and allow users to communicate between the two.
The issue is that all of us will pay for it. I have a Facebook, Linked-In, Twitter, Plaxo, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google profiles. Each of these profiles got created for a specific reason and because it was required by the individual provider but I really don’t use any of them regularly because it is a pain to keep them updated accordingly.
The interesting thing is that there are also many other profiles that are created automatically by services that many people do not actually know about and never update. Search on your name on Google and most likely you will find your name on some Executive profiling service with a profile that contains your work history and education history. The issue is that more often than not the information is outdated or just plainly incorrect. And since the person does not know about this profile to begin with, that profile will remain being out of sync.
It is my opinion that we will not see interoperability between these profile providers anytime soon and actually see more fragmenting since each provider will have to offer something extra to lure users and that will just cause more data that can be potentially incompatible with other networks.
Almost every interoperability standard out there today got started because it had benefit for business. Profile interoperability will have the opposite effect since it will reduce the need of the user to visit the provider’s site and cause reduction in revenues.
Until someone is able to come up with a reason as to how sharing profiles will increase revenue, interoperability will never happen.
Agreed, Jim. There is little incentive at the moment for these services to actually ‘play nice with each other.
Currently, these social profiling services try to differentiate themselves from one another by focusing on capturing a certain aspect of the user such as maybe Facebook attempts to capture information for making friends while LinkedIn captures information you would normally find on a resume.
It would be great to fit all these aspects of the user into a one stop web destination but like Jim mentioned, this goes against the ad-driven model of tne social profiling sites.
It’s ironic that these social profiling services are being rather anti-social when it comes to getting along with each other. That’s business I guess. Creates a rather big mess for the users.
Astute observation, there is not much incentive, b/c the companies with profiles know open standards will quickly kill their advantage — Amazon, Google, MSN and Yahoo all have the computational power and more importantly the traffic to render the profile portion of their service moot. Once the profiles are common to all services, only the communication streams are left.
Most of these social network services don’t have any technology that places them in a defensible position. The services only have network effects — however, yahoo, google, msn and amazon have large amounts of traffic — in particular traffic associated with names to slowly crush that network effect.
I hope this is the start of something big and they do compete with facebook soon. They already have great email, groups, apps, photos, youtube, chat, voice, and if they bought twitter or better yet friendfeed they’d have the stream. All they’d need is to add real time notifications of email, etc. and a chat bar and they could be equal to facebook by this time tomorrow.
But all that said I’m still not hopeful they’ll put it all together anytime soon. This has frustrated me for too long.
Google already bought Jaiku, which was a far better service than Twitter from an end-user point of view. If they’d put their marketing weight behind it, Twitter would be a fading memory now.
Instead, they ripped it apart, took out the bit they wanted (geolocation, now known as Latitude) and threw the rest on the scrap-heap. A real shame.
i am pretty sure google is using fb connect. no??
If you’re referring to the YouTube page that circulated recently, that was not Google, but rather a client of their who had implemented it on their page.
Here’s a quote from someone at Google basically approving of FB Connect on YouTube. Sounds like Google is cool with it:
“This interaction between YouTube and Facebook is the first of its kind,” Google’s Benjamin Faes, Head of YouTube & Display for Europe, Middle East and Africa, said in a release. “We are creating a new technology implementation with these platforms. At any time during Green Eyed World, viewers can comment or vote, creating a live dialogue between themselves, their friends and the hero. The video pauses, and a small window pops up where the interaction can take place quickly and easily.”
What about using OpenID?
I’ll answer your question with a question: How long have people been asking that exact same question?
I bet it will happen. It makes sense for big players to be as open as possible. Lacking that just breeds distrust which means less growth and less sharing.
OpenID? If you have 30 sites you have 29 more chances to be defrauded. No way in hell
OpenID alone does not provide a huge advantage over email+password login. OpenID combined with Portable Contacts does, as it brings over your profile and friends list. OpenID with Portable Contacts and Activity streams enables the flow of events back to your chosen custodian. That’s what we’re building, connecting each standard together on top of the previous consensus. See http://bit.ly/opencycle
It’s a mess, but we’re slowly getting the infrastructure in place to solve this problem: OpenID, OAuth, portable contacts, Open Social.
It will happen; just getting tired of waiting…
I think the reason there will never be a standard like you want is that once that happens all these sites essentially become the same thing (as if that isn’t already the case). Facebook doesn’t want to be like Myspace and Twitter doesn’t want to be like Facebook. Once all the information becomes the same there is no need to have them. This is happening already with Twitter, Facebook and Myspace. Facebook, as far as I can remember, did the status updates first. Then along comes Twitter and Myspace. And while Twitter is all about the status updates, those updates are also a major part of Facebook (not so much for Myspace. And now you can even update them all at once. Well what is the point in having them all then if you are posting the same information to all?
That’s quite a negative post. Everything must go through a process before coming to a comfortable standard.
These profiles are relatively new, at least in their importance, so it will take time to mature.
I see this tug of war between services incredibly advantageous for the user.
How so Michelle?
“And so we remain at a stand still. It’s one of those situations where, while competition may not be a bad thing, it can be a frustrating thing. I wonder how long until we see Yahoo add profiles to its search results? And maybe Microsoft will further its relationship with Facebook to add limited profile information from there to its queries. It’s already a mess, and it’s going to get worse before it gets better — if it ever does”.
I’m not dissing. My first sentence was pretty harsh, sorry about that. My point is that we can look at all this competition as an excellent thing, and the necessity of multiple updates as a minor inconvenience while the geniuses are at work
I’d have to agree. While they are busy working to get out the best client, we benefit from it because we get the end result
. Unless of course the one that ends up being the best isn’t the client you like.
Yeah, competition is not a bad thing, but sometimes its frustrating. For me, its important to choose which is the best service that we trust to maintain our profile (real and detail for serious purpose) and which is just for dummy profile (for fun and event for little bit naughty profile on d’web). Cool post MG
You profile URL should be owned by you, e.g. http://techcrun...h.com/mgsiegler and indexed by aggregators/search engines.
The idea that this should be centralized on FB is kind of crazy. There is frankly no reason why what is essentially, an electronic business card, a slightly more modern version of vCard, should be locked to a big centralized database behind a walled garden.
It is easy to federate this, and it should be. Imagine if LiveJournal had cornered the market on ‘blogging’, and everyone had to go to LJ to read blogs, there was no RSS, and TechCrunch would be here arguing against RSS and decentralization and cheerleading proprietary standards for what is frankly, a commodity.
The hidden subtext appears to be “accept Facebook as defacto standard”. This is unacceptable. Something as fundamental as login profiles or profile records should be portable and decentralized.
Okay, but that would require that everyone have their own web server or something like it, and that unfortunately is unreasonable for most people. Obviously, that’s a good idea in theory, but in practice…
With regards to blogging, I think that’s a different beast. I could go into why, but that would take up way too much room here. Maybe another post in the future.
I only lean towards Facebook in the post because a) it’s the biggest right now and would resolve some of this the fastest and
b) i actually think they’ve done the best job of anyone with profiles so far. though i do like the simplicity of the google ones.
I truly could care less who/what the standard is. I just want there to be one so I don’t have to update 25 profiles independently.
It no more requires everyone to run their own webserver than RSS/Blogging requires everyone to run their own local copy of Wordpress. Obviously, some people would, and some others would run profile hosting services for others. And some would run profile aggregators or sync applications. There could be desktop integration, and iphone/android integration for syncing as well.
Ray has it exactly right. The point of open specifications is that sites can interoperate without a business relationship; in fact they can do so without knowing of each others’ existence, because they follow the same specifications. You should be able to host your own profile on your own server, OR let an established social custodian do it for you and still be able to interoperate. That’s the goal. More here: http://bit.ly/bespoke
Hmmm,..nice discussion guys, I thing I’ve made a right choice joining crunch networks. there is plenty of knowledge that i can get from here.
Anyway, the decentralized theory from Ray is good idea and ideal for everyone. But honestly, it little bit difficult for many people, there is still digital divide between developed and developing countries. Even for some countries Internet still an expensive thing. Maybe that theory will applicable on d’next few years, but for know, FB, GFC and any other service still the best solutions for many people around d’globe.
Decentralization seems to be a good concept indeed. That would save a lot of time on our part. The nightmare would reduce and our profiles would be updated as well. Innovative thought Ray!
I love face book and twitter.
Enough said
But, that’s how it can be… isn’t it? It’s business and everybody will have their own service competing with their competitors.
That way users also have more choice of choosing the one that they like… do you have a solution for this? I dont think this problem will be solved just by Google using FB Connect, will it?
I agree, that is business — but it’s rough on the users. There is no simple solution, but Google adopting Facebook Connect would be interesting for sure… Or Facebook scrapping Facebook Connect for Friend Connect for that matter…
I stand by you Siegler. It is a rough take on users.
It is simple: don’t use any of them: nothing to update! If you’re a celeb, run your own site. If you’re not — how many people do you think are searching for you & actually care anyway? On how many platforms?
Stay in touch with people you actually know, which means more than tweeting and hoping they follow you. On the job front, network (the good ol’ fashioned way), send out résumés, etc.
Bah humbug.
I agree with Michelle.
We are in the infantile stages of whatever this social-networking thing is. We have multiple companies fighting over who will be the ‘end all’ to it. This is to the users advantage. If you don’t update something, delete it. Or better yet don’t sign up. If you really want to keep in contact with people on that network email or call them.
What’s really interesting to me is, what does the ‘end all’ really give the company that wins? Personal data? This is only useful for Google or any advertising company that owns 75% or greater share of the industry.
I think our culture will look back on this time and get a small chuckle at how naive and dumb we were about sticking our toes into online connectivity. However, we’ll get a big laugh at all the large corporations that threw absurd amounts of money into thinking that accumulating all our personal data would amount to ‘The Next Big Thing,’
double true.
Exactly why it’s not working. There will not be a standard on an Internet that is never static. Nobody will fully trust it either, especially those who have seen the perils, foibles and screwups that are humans.
We are too freaky to win.
I totally agree with MG on this. From a user standpoint this is a nightmare. Most folks would probably stick to linkedin or their blog until this dust settles.
I came across chi.mp via @mrinaldesai @dylans, I am going to check it out. Have you used it MG?
What if Facebook connected us to Everything?
http://bit.ly/fbconnected
#socialnerdia
I have a solution at least I think so :/
I agree openness is certainly more better then walled gardens……
but there is consequences to openness especially for companies that rely on traffic and ad revenue openness is just not practical for their business model and to keep it free thats not going to change anytime soon..well that an app stores/markets and micro payments.
For the longest time I brainstormed a centralized gateway it was so obvious to me and I thought it was going to be the next big thing one app that allows you to basically do everything across multiple sites, networks, services apps and presences (would make a better Web OS then a desktop emulator :/) that was before i realized how to take care of business on the web
so i went back to the drawing board and came up with something better
An Intelligent bot or rather a digital secretary if you will called AIDA (artificial intelligent digital assistant)
AIDA started out as a brainstorming project to make voice recognition more intuitive basically a way to visually represent a voice recognition program via a customizable avatar I was thinking I could improve the voice recognition experience by using animations of the avatar together with sound effects and what not.
then I added some “crazy” ideas of how to improve the usability/accuracy of voice recognition a platform for starters..(way too many others to list here)
then i thought it would be cool to use AIDA to facilitate the folowing functionality:
- to intelligently filter and sort alerts/content/feeds from multiple sources
-relay those alerts/content/feeds to the user as configured by the user leveraging every medium known to man (phone, text, email, fax, ect) depending on relevancy and importance to the user
-make recommendations
Then from there it wasn’t hard to make the jump to an all out digital secretary in which users would interact with on all of their devices or indirectly with a simple phone call, text, email or im chat, ect
However there is lots of challenges for this to work AIDA needs to be able to hold a conversation and MUST be designed as a non intrusive assistant for the user. AIDA should not be designed to take over and do everything FOR the user
should do as little or as much as the user wants it too
I know the technology exists at least i think so. lonely people have been programming chat bots since the 90s (i think) and a lot of them are passing turing test (i thin) and there are probably tons of AI algorithms that are insanely complex intelligent/smart (i think) the hard part is putting those two together and then bringing the AI to life with a voice a personality and with the ability to communicate across multiple mediums with voice, text, images ect
but anyways that’s my solution its like a chat bot + AI + voice recog + platform + bot + APIs to facilitate a digital secretary to assist users in managing their digital lifestyles.
take it, help me, steal it or leave it
I really don’t care
D
I read this site and I’m proud to say I”m not on facebook or MySpace. I’m also proud to say I wont go running to the next “in” thing. Social Networks, or, networks in general need to provide value. The point that you are making MG is a fair one about interoperability and data but let’s operate in reality for a moment…
Most of us don’t actually have 11,000 friends. We don’t need to update people on everything we are doing all the time at the same time. Centralized personal data aggregation has the potential to be dangerous in many ways.
If you want your FaceSpaceSter.net – fine! Let’s have open standards and interfaces.
If you don’t, then there needs to be a way for the rest of us to insure our privacy from it. Preventing invites, twits, comments, photos, etc about us poor innocent souls who just want to live our lives on the intertubes using the old fashioned imap account.
techcrunch comment
It makes sense for people to take control of what google shows about them…good move.
I don’t mind Google introducing a profile but I would have preferred having the option of choosing the username. I’m intrigued by the direction they are taking this as will they turn on the ability to feed from the social profiles associated with the Google profile?
Isn’t this what OpenID and OAuth is for? Maybe they can add a provision in the spec so that you can just go on your main provider, and update your information for all of the sites that you’ve signed into before.
Professor Ian Angell’s take on Profiling. A must read.
http://webcoher...of-the-shadows/
Its a good story. I have not looked up my name in Google for awhile. Most times finding others with the same name as me. At times finding little or spurious info on myself. With Google Profile you can add your Profile to the biggest indexer in the World and correct any mistakes.
Yesterday, Google made it easy. Just type “Me” in the Google Search Bar. Fill in your details. You can also make your own Profile URL.
Chris
Posted about this and the benefits of having multiple personas: http://www.mich...ersona-disorder
Of course this is still a pain in the ass to maintain.
I think this whole social network and web 2.0 stuff is a bubble that’s waiting to burst. Only the strong ones will survive.
I love Fbook Friend connect it makes things so much easier!
I agree that there are many social sites, with so many great innovations. The strong will survive and this market is a good test.
I am also in doubt, Google will never use facebook profile.
Profile consolidation is in the horizon – http://www.info...-consolidation/
I agree, it’s an annoying situation. My solution? Facebook is PURELY social. I don’t care if my page isn’t up to date because it’s just friends. Friends that are actually friends (or maybe friends of friends or maybe even random people) but NOT colleagues. Doesn’t solve the google issue, but it is a step…