ReadWriteWeb

Gist.com is a database of dynamic, information-rich user profiles that can be accessed via the Web or inside your email or other communication-management tool, or on your mobile device.

The database is populated with the people who have signed up for Gist's public beta and their contacts. There are 100 million profiles of people and companies behind Gist's wall, collected over about a year. Now, Gist wants users to "claim" their profiles by updating their own data (and potentially making some information public).

Over the last few days, there has been a lot of buzz about how much private information your public Google profile contains if you don't choose the right settings. The URL of your profile alone can already give away your Gmail address. To hide this address from public view, you can switch your profile URL away from showing your name to using an address that features a 21-digit number instead of your username. However, as it turns out, this isn't a foolproof method either. By using a very simple trick, anybody can quickly figure out your Gmail address from these numbers.

If you've been on the Internet for long enough, you may remember the old UNIX finger command. With finger, you could just type in a command like finger email@readwriteweb.com and the email server would return more information about this person. Today, Google enabled the next generation of the finger command - WebFinger - for all Gmail accounts with public profiles. WebFinger provides users with a standardized and decentralized way of sharing their profile and identity information online.

Google has added a number of new social calendars to the options on Google Calender, the most notable for geeks being your friends' birthdays. Dates are pulled from your GMail contacts that have filled in their birthdays in their Google Profiles.

This could be a fascinating example of using multiple services together in a way that adds value to users' social lives and incentivizes them to contribute personal data to the system. It would be if anyone but geek early adopters filled out Google Profiles. Give it a try, though, and let us know whose birthdays appear for you. Old friends and family? Or just geeks online?

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.