If you'd like to tweak the results for your profile - or hide your profile completely - you can always log in using your Twitter credentials or your FriendFeed key.

Oh great. Yet another profile to complete? Not exactly. Thanks to SocialWhois' "voodoo" button. One click and you're likely to have your profile pre-populated with relevant information from your profiles across the Web.

This Isn't a Popularity Contest

One of the things that makes SocialWhois so appealing isn't what it is, but rather what it isn't. It isn't a popularity contest. It's a search for relevance:

"SocialWhois is about everything but popularity. You'll think that it's hypocrisy or irony, but I (SocialWhois' creator) am not popular on SocialWhois! And guess what, I like it that way! Really :) In fact, on SocialWhois, no one is popular.... You can navigate in the graph and discover new faces, and the way this graph is being traversed is different for everyone of us."

With the tagging functionality, you're more likely to find that user who shares similar interests with you. And in so doing, you're likely to have more engaging conversations.

It Just Works

One of the things we've always loved about whois is the fact that it just works. There are any number of services that allow you to look at the data held by the registrars, all of which have varying levels of usability and clutter. But by and large, we run whois lookups because they serve a specific purpose.

SocialWhois has a lot of that same appeal. Simple, straightforward, and it provides the information you're seeking. It will be interesting to add this to the collection of tools we use to find - and better understand - those around us on the social web.

The new program, Inbox 3.0, offers several new features including enhanced relevancy, attention reporting, easy subscription adding, flag synchronization and a redesigned UI.

You may remember back in January, NewsGator began giving away many of their products for free, including FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, and others available here. What you may not have realised is why.

As it turns out, the power of their newly expanded community is being utilized to form the backbone of the company's relevance engine. When you flag an item, email a clipping, save a clipping, etc., this anonymous usage data is sent back to NewsGator. (This was fully disclosed by the company and can be turned off, if desired. Read more in the FAQ).

By combining this "relevance metadata," NewsGator can provide their users, like those using Inbox 3.0, with the most relevant news and information while also keeping track of what subscriptions you care most about and allowing you to export this information in APML (Attention Profiling Mark-up Language) so it can be shared with other services.

If you go to "My Reading Habits," from the toolbar, you have the option to export as either APML or OPML. The APML option sorts your feeding by attention - that is by how much you interact with the feed. This APML file can then be imported into other programs.

Exporting Attention Data

NewsGator's Nick Bradbury is a big proponent of APML, having joined the APML Workgroup back in October. Unfortunately, though, although the program exports APML, there is no import APML feature, nor was there a way to import the APML to my other NewsGator program, FeedDemon. However, according to an older post on Bradbury's blog, import is supposed to be the next step they focus on, so we hope to see import support soon.

In addition to the attention and relevancy improvements, the new version of Inbox 3.0 offers a new UI which is designed to fit in more with Outlook 2007's look and feel, and easy subscription adding. Also, the flag synchronization feature syncs flagged items between different computers running Outlook but also between NewsGator's Mac and PC RSS readers – NetNewsWire and FeedDemon.

For many office workers, a good part of the day is spent in Outlook, so Inbox 3.0 will be a nice find for them, especially because the program, like the desktop readers, is free.

The Representatives

Google will be represented by Brad Fitzpatrick, the inventor of LiveJournal and one of the primary minds behind OpenID, the concept of the Social Graph and the Google-led OpenSocial platform. Facebook will be represented by Benjamin Ling, who today runs the Facebook platform. Ling defected from Google three months ago, where he ran Google Checkout, to join Facebook. Also joining the workgroup is Joseph Smarr of Plaxo, probably the catalyst for all of this after his company scraped Robert Scoble's Facebook account and set off a huge debate about Data Portability and privacy.

Challenges Ahead

If these industry titans can put aside their rivalry and work together - magic could happen. Hopefully they can work appropriately with the other members of the working group, bleeding edge consultants and representatives of smaller and in many cases more user-centric companies. If so, perhaps we can move appropriately into a future of powerful personalization and logically augmented activity online - while avoiding Minority Report-style dystopian scenarios.

Innovation on the internet is in its early, early days. The participation of representatives from Google and Facebook in this initiative could prove key in the continued development of what's possible, instead of the early suffocation of what could have been.

May the participants work nicely together to create the magic that we're waiting for.

See also: The ReadWriteWeb toollkit for 2008, where you'll find resources for tracking data portability and other key issues in the coming year.

Note: comments were off temporarily due to a poorly timed database error. But they are back now.

It's applications like this that make me love my job reviewing what's new on the web.

I don't know why more sites don't take some stab at accepting inbound APML and offering personalization of content, but I sure am glad to see this site doing so. The APML page on Idiomag could use some explanation and I don't see that it's linked to elsewhere on the site - but there's not a whole lot of demand yet either. What's important is that this service is in the game.

The degree of personalization is really impressive. The video below demonstrates how Idiomag pulls in syndicated content from all over the web and assembles it seamlessly. The automated integration of text and media is particularly striking.

Just like Pandora or Last.fm, your recommendations get increasingly fine tuned by voting for each "article" you like or dislike. My APML file doesn't have much music in it but I plugged my Pandora profile into Idiomag and am already discovering some cool new music. It's an awesome product that is best experienced by trying it out.

The biggest problem with the service is probably its limited content. It's only useful for some musical genres and is far from unlimited in what it offers even in those. For a quick, personalized, daily read with some videos and videos, though, I'm really impressed.

Check out this video below to see how it works.