How Would You Like Google To Describe You? Vote Today
Yesterday, Google made a major change to the search results page that appears when you search for a person's name. Google Profiles, for people who have set them up, now appear on those pages. Today, Google opened a discussion about Google Profiles and called for voting on ideas about what they include.
Profile options are already being changed in response to popular requests; a new section of contact information that you can expose only to selected groups of people has just been added, for example. This opportunity to influence how Google describes you via your profile could be a very important one, and it's worth your while to take a look at the discussion and cast some votes for and against ideas. As we write this, only 600 people have so far.
For example, Google Social Graph API creator, Brad Fitzpatrick, posted a request to add rel="me" markup to the profiles so that the smart applications (like this one) can tie together all the accounts from various websites people list on their Profle pages. Several other people asked to have music playlists or GTalk IM status messages included in Google Profiles. Others asked that Google Profiles by tied to Gmail contacts for easy viewing in other applications.
There's a lot of optional fields you can fill out in a Google Profile now. You're asked to list where you work, where you went to school, where you've worked in the past, what your "superpower" is and other information. When Google Profiles got pushed to center stage yesterday, we voiced a concern that most peoples' concerns about what shows up when people search for their name on Google is too much information. Being told that the answer is to give Google even more info about us, in order to have any influence on our public appearance, seems ironic at least.
The Potential For Innovation
The potential for innovators to make use of these profile pages, if they are marked up well and made available, is really incredible. Just imagine: Dear Google, please show my software to all the people you know with Google Profiles who have listed their Delicious accounts, have bookmarked in Delicious more than 10 links around the web with one of 10 common food-related tags, who live in California, Oregon or Washington, and who have YouTube accounts as well. I want to gather a list of the videos that are most popular this week with food lovers on the West Coast.
That might be a pipe dream, but it certainly wouldn't be technically difficult if markup was good, the data was exposed well to developers, and Google Profiles caught on well enough to build a large data set. Imagine the incredible variety of potential permutations of profile fields, cross referenced with data found on linked-to third party websites, that such a scenario would offer.
There are simple issues and there are complex ones that come up when public profiles become important on the biggest information discovery site in the world. There are privacy concerns and there are wishes and hopes for data-centric innovation. Who doesn't have thoughts about how they would like to be described to the world? Now's your chance to vote on it.
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Privacy is dead? Below are the 100 things that users are sharing on the internet.
1.Account ID
2.User Name
3.First Name
4.Last Name
5.Academic Title
6.Academic Degree
7.Sex/Gender
8.Birth/Maiden Name
9.Relationship StatusUser Identifiers and Attributes. Social Network Analysis.
10.Sexual Preferences
11.Birthday
12.Sign of the Zodiac
13.Hometown
14.Country
15.Time Zone
16.Political Views
17.Religious Views
18.Address
19.City
20.Zip
21.Country
22.Website
23.Email
24.Mobile Phone
25.Land Phone
26.Fax
27.Skype ID
28.ICQ ID
29.AIM ID
30.Yahoo ID
31.WindowsLive ID
32.GoogleTalk ID
33.Purchase History
34.Status
35.Employer
36.Position/Title
37.Company Website
38.Address
39.City
40.Zip Code
41.State
42.Country
43.Industry
44.Description
45.Wants
46.Haves
47.Time Period From
48.Time Period To
49.Business Organization
50.College/University
51.Class Year
52.Attended for
53.Degree
54.College/Graduate School
55.Concentration
56.Second Concentration
57.Third Concentration
58.Degree
59.High School
60.Class Year
61.Act
What if I am not so keen on exposing my personal information, linking all of my profiles together. Am I the only person who want to be the behind-scene guy?
Grant, I don't have my Google Profile exposed right now either :)
interesting, a lot of the feedback makes it seem like people want google profiles to be... facebook.
Manage your online identity by creating a profile using Google vanity URL. It will be one cohesive place for all your online profiles and it can get indexed by Google easily. Market your personal brand by verifying your credentials using Free Crederity account.
Imagine all of the data Google has on you...based on data you enter, sites you visit, analytics, gmail, and so many other sources, they know quite a bit about each and ever one of us that uses the Internet.
At least they didn't make it a wiki and allow others to post their thoughts about an individual, provide a comment, or rate someone. :)
Imagine the incredible variety of potential permutations of profile fields, cross referenced with data found on linked-to third party websites, that such a scenario would offer
There are simple issues and there are complex ones that come up when public profiles become important on the biggest information discovery site in the world
a lot of the feedback makes it seem like people want google profiles to be... facebook.
http://www.yasni.com have been doing this for ages - ive deleted so much info online that i didn't even know was public thanks to yasni. but i guess, just like normal, google have a half-hearted attempt and come out with more coverage than obama.
thank you admin.
I coundt fine the page for voting? is it broked link?
Okey now it works for me thank you
Very interesting article and comments, great food for though. I agree, it's just amazing how much data we share on the web. We're always hungry for more social networking tools, but at what price. Just thinking about how much info facebook has on every of it's users, it's insane.