The need for a universal social profiling service

The concept of social profiling fits into the entire Presence Builder Project. As we join up with ever increasing business and social media sites it becomes difficult to keep ones profile/presence updated and standardised.

When you leave your job or are asked to leave and you find your new dream job then where in amongst all of the sites you have a presence on would you update these details?

Would you just change your Xing or LinkedIn profile? Would you also update your Facebook, FriendFeed and Yahoo profiles? What about Twitter and your blog if you manage one? How do you keep up?

Of course you have your own additional spaces on the internet that you inhabit. Some of these might also need to be updated if you have a change in your personal circumstance.

As with all new industries there are calls for profile standards. Some services promise to update your information across multiple networks at the click of a mouse.

But will that work?

Let’s just take one aspect of ones online presence as an example. Can one have one user ID - username - across all of the sites that one is member of. OpenID tries to offer that. The OpenID Foundation was formed in June 2007 to help promote, protect and enable the OpenID technologies and the community. (their words).

OpenID allows you to set up one ID that may be used across multiple different websites in this way making it a lot simpler to enjoy the online experience. The use of one user ID would also make it easier to protect ones reputation and manage ones presence.

However, even though a few thousand sites accept OpenID, not all of them do. Until it’s a universally accepted protocol, it is bound to stay outside the mainstream.

Now take that one step further. What about the rest of the general information one has available on the internet. That would be education, career history, relationships maybe, holiday experiences etc.

Is it possible to update this information once and have it automatically update on all of the sites you are member of? But that wouldn’t work either. Every site you are member of serves a different purpose for you. And you participate in a different way.

You use serious words to describe your career path on a site such as LinkedIn. On Facebook you might not even mention where you work. You might just share what you are currently doing. And Twitter only allows you such limited space so what do you leave out?

The only way that one user ID and profile would be a possibility would be if there were one totally monopolistic service. This is something I always think Google aspires to. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. Nothing like decent competition to keep the door open for innovative new products.

Until a solution is found, you will need to keep track of all your sign-ins. My back-up systems is (and I know it’s rather pathetic) in my paper based diary. Yes I still carry one of those around with me. Ok so I’m old fashioned.

My list of usernames and passwords extends over three pages. And of course in order to keep it safe, it’s encoded in such a way only I can work out what it all means. Secret code to hide secret code. Now all I need is to forget my second secret code and then I’m really in trouble!

Maybe somebody will come up with a new solution to social profiling. I’ll be one of the first to sign up to it! Talking about signing up, don’t forget to sign up to the RSS feed or e-mail newsletters. No secret code required.