Identify: Google People With Two Keystrokes
There's a lot of information about many of us spread around the web and though privacy is important to discuss - there's also another side of that coin. It can be very useful to tie together info from disparate sources about a particular individual. Today I saw a tool for finding those various profile pages that really impressed me.
About this time last year Google's Brad Fitzpatrick, also the creator of OpenID, led the development of the Google Social Graph API. It's a search engine for all the webpages that we identify as profiles online and it tracks the connections between pages linked together for a single person. At a small event today in Sebastapol, California, British developer Glenn Jones demonstrated the most compelling tool I've seen yet for leveraging this powerful technology.
Called simply Identify, Jones's tool is a Firefox plug-in you can evoke from any web page that has links tagged rel="me". Just click the control key and the "i" key to get a pop-up offering information put together from all around the web about the person the page is associated with. It works on Twitter profile pages, LinkedIn pages, blogs with good markup and other profile pages.
The data that gets displayed can be frightening if you've exposed more information about yourself than you'd like on a rel="me" linked page. Or it can be disappointing if you're someone who wants a well developed web presence but haven't linked profile pages up well. Perhaps tools like Identify will prompt some people to change the way they profile themselves.
The tool is clearly very useful as a way to learn more about people whose usernames you come across online. It's not perfect but it's often quite good. The new Yahoo Query Language helps tie together levers and pulleys behind the scenes. It could use a lot of work still and we hope it gets it. Jones says he made the project as a demonstration that the early work that's been done so far on the Social Graph API is already able to deliver value.
We've been using another interface built by Martin Atkins for some time and this weekend we saw an even more sophisticated option offered to customers of social media ping server service Gnip. That there are a lot of smart people working on this and offering up even early solutions to a hungry group of users underlines further how valuable social graph search is.
Brad Fitzpatrick wrote extensively about the prospects and importance of the social graph in 2007, while the wheels were turning. He's at the same event this weekend (Social Web FOO Camp) where Jones presented his experimental project but says he hasn't seen it yet. He's very excited to learn about a serious user interface for the service, though, and told us that the Social Graph API is about to ramp up its efforts substantially.
Obviously privacy, web user education and proper support for metadata are all discussions that need to go on, but there's already a lot of data available and connected.
You can download Jones's plug-in for Firefox now or grab this related bookmarklet to click on any profile page: social graph explorer
A nice clickable end-user interface is only the beginning of what could be done by this kind of standards-based cross site people-search. Mark up your profile pages well, folks, it's time to use our data smartly!
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Thanks for mentioning Gnip's forthcoming Profile Discovery Service. We're looking forward to doing a full announcement at RWW shortly.
Fascinating!
Very interesting. Both approaches, XFN and Google's Social Graph API are, lets say, bottom-up approaches because they grasp their information from existing Web sites that were made for humans. They do that by seeking for special annotations or on a computational basis, respectively.
My opinion is that in the long term a top-down approach will solve lots of these problems (see a post about the Web of Data here http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/web_of_data_machine_accessible_information.php). My feeling is that a Web of Identities (forthcoming post) consisting of Identity Providers will grant much higher level of control over customer data exposed to 3rd parties to their customers. Take Google Profiles or the different reputation start-ups as a starting point.
The named approaches are impressive, but I'd feel too little control about what an algorithm (Social Graph API) thinks is also me.
Things are getting dangerous, I think. People should really start to carefully think what they are going to publish about themselves. Any information you put online about yourself might one day be used against you.
This is cool. The plugin works on beta.friendfeed.com too.
Posted by: Meryn Stol
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April 19, 2009 7:26 AM
Great late night post, Marshall. Apt for a Saturday night. The tools for quickly searching for, aggregating and organizing our distributed online identities just keep getting better and better, for good or worse. Thanks for sharing this one.
Another thing to note here is maybe that twitter.com publishes XFN annotated links without telling the user about it or giving an option to disable it.
While this might be success for the microformats people that their inventions are used (and they of course paved the way for todays efforts in interoperability) it might not be such a a success for privacy. So "control" always must be part of data portability as well.
And seeing my profile above I feel the need to update it immediately as things are of course changing. Which shows another problem: Right now you have still 1000 profiles all around the social web and all what's maybe being done is that it's being copied from one site to another. The final solution should be to just have one profile which is synchronized over all sites automatically.
This add-on seems incompatible with Firefox 3.1b3, see this screenshot: http://sn.im/identify_incompatible
Looking forward to try it though.
I wrote a similar tool to Identify some time ago. You can find it described here:
http://www.heychinaski.com/blog/?page_id=66
And install it from here
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7781
It lacks the visual style and finish of Identify but it seems to turn up a few more links as it also display pages that link to the current page (Other Possible Links)
I wrote a similar tool to Identify some time ago. You can find it described here:
http://www.heychinaski.com/blog/?page_id=66
And install it from here
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7781
It lacks the visual style and finish of Identify but it seems to turn up a few more links as it also display pages that link to the current page (Other Possible Links)
Hey it's mrtoph! I know him!
Wow, Google just keeps on gettin better and better!
RT
www.privacy.pro.tc
Didn't work for me :-( . Went to my twitter page and it came up with profile and info about someone in Portland Oregon- I'm in New Zealand.
Great post, The plugin works in facebook too. http://www.softwarefreedown.com
In response to Data, Post #4 (http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/identify_google_people_with_two_keystrokes.php#comment-134285)
Danerous or not? Shouldn't the good guys get proper credit for what they do? Just as the bad guys should get their proper consequences as well. Isn't it fair for me to know that John Doe has swindled hundreds of people before I do business with him? I think this has potential.
Didn't work for me. Too bad, I was curious to see it work.
Thanks for all the great technical info Marshall. The YQL link is particularly interesting to me and something I hadn't seen before. You always do a great job highlighting the cool technologies powering the new media tools we all love.
just want so say some thing "great job"
Look at the best search engines from one place!
http://searchbooter.com/
ecellent post, This plugin works great with facebook as well. try it!
It's easy to get lost in all the tech, and forget that the key is how much of our identity is now online. Over time our identity score will become more important than our credit score, and much harder to change. Before we enjoy the voyeuristic thrill of spying on others, we should all worry about what we reveal about ourselves. Even worse what is revealed by mistaken identification with the "real" us. I think reputation literacy training should be a basic part of social media use. I've been writing about this a lot on my Google Alerts blog. Here's a recent example, if anyone wants to learn more:
http://www.alertrank.com/mrgooglealerts/2009/04/19/its-a-reputation-report-not-a-vanity-search/
Unless the person you're searching for is at least semi-famous, you get more info about a person by searching in their screen name or email.
http://scoopea.com/Software/Identify_Google_People_With_Two_Keystrokes_ReadWriteWeb
check http://yourtvonline.com
Great post!!
check http://yourtvonline.com
Hi 5 folks ... thanks for the heads up with in this post I reckon Google will be tweaking away in the back ground creating something Simula to this me tool we have to expect that no matter what we post online leaves a footprint in any case so any tool that helps you establish your presence is your present for working diligently online can only be good for you especially if your in to marketing...
All my best to you and your About Me
Phillip Skinner
Cool people search app.
At a small event today in Sebastapol, California, British developer Glenn Jones demonstrated the most compelling tool I've seen yet for leveraging this powerful technology.