Where's Your Profile Online?

Patty's Musings and Questions on Profile Overload

I’ve been doing some client research recently. I’ve been looking at your profiles on FaceBook, Linked In, Plaxo, et al. I’ve been following your tweets. I’m not surprised to learn that the vast majority of our clients (many of whom are baby boomers, like me) have quite a lot of information purposely posted on the ‘Net. This is pretty useful. For example, if I want to introduce one client to another, I can send an email introducing them but also include links to their Facebook/Linked In/Plaxo pages or Twitter handles.

I’ve also been thinking (again/always) about how best to create an online community among like-minded busy, already information-overloaded professionals. So here’s my question to you. If you’re a customer-centric executive and an active client of the Patricia Seybold Group, do you want to create yet another profile on our site in order to interact with us and with your colleagues? Wouldn’t it make more sense to just provide a photo/icon/screen name and link it to all the identities you already have?

I know that I’m getting tired of creating multiple profiles everywhere, and I find myself loosely coupling everything to everything I already have. For example, you can see my blog posts and my tweets if you go to my Facebook page. If you go to my Friendfeed profile, you can also see everything I tag on De.li.cious. Do you care? I have no idea, but I enjoy following your feeds. In today’s loosely-coupled, highly distributed world, it seems as if we all want to expose bits of pieces of ourselves, our interests and our activities in different corners of the Web. If someone were to assemble all the pieces of me that are out there online and pull them together into an “uber-profile” how would I feel about it? I’d probably be appalled by all the outdated information that’s floating around and scurry around to fix it. I don’t know if I would feel that my privacy had been invaded, but I might. Because for each service I use, I reveal or expose the thoughts and activities and facets of my life that I feel are relevant and appropriate for that audience and context. When you pull them together into an uber-profile (as I’m sure someone is doing somewhere), then there are things that will turn up that I may not have thought carefully enough about sharing and now they’re out there forever! So, my current thinking is that I may continue to use these various aggregation mechanisms to pull my own fractured public profile together, but I would be appalled if someone else did that and posted it on a public page.

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POLL: How Many Profiles Do You Have? And Do You Want (You/Someone Else) to Aggregate Them?

What do you think? Take the Poll.

Comments

[Michael Saunby]

I'm not a client, but I follow your blog and I'm on blog catchup using Google Reader right now.

Yours is an excellent idea but it seems Google have got there already. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/04/search-for-me-on-google.html

(Albeit after you posted the idea)

It does work - I've created an entry already.

For you and I with our reasonably distinctive names it should work fine. But what about folks with names like John Smith, or Michael Jackson? How is that going to work? Will they invent new super-hero like handles - "customer-co-des-grl", or include fragments of their job description and location - "John Smith Computer Scientist, London" ???

[David Ing (coevolving.com)]

Loose coupling is an interesting design point. People forget that the Internet means INTERnet, which is loose coupling by design.

I selectively follow a very few people on Twitter -- they need to have very high signal-to-noise -- then a few more people on Friendfeed (who I try to read within a few days), and then subscribe to a whole bunch more in a feed reader (FeedDemon) that I eventually get to. I move people up and down these scales of intimacy, depending on whether I'm learning anything or not.

In managing my own personal web domains, however, I'm probably in the minority of people who worry about aggregating web profiles. Since Friendfeed aggregation is a high bar, and Facebook participation is a low bar, an interesting correlative test could be to ask how many people have signed up to use OpenID. If a person doesn't see the value in a single web signon, I doubt that they would see the value in a consolidated web profile ... or at least don't find it important enough to take action.

P.S. I've recently redeveloped the style sheet at http://coevolving.com to surface Friendfeed rather than Twitter, since Friendfeed aggregates my tweets. People who use feed readers probably don't care, but there's a lot of people don't yet understand open sharing of web activity.