The Twitterfication of Profiles
Posted by Nick O'Neill on March 31st, 2008 9:00 AM
Profiles are dead. If someone tells you of their new startup idea that involves the creation of user profiles, tell them to quit while they are ahead. It’s not that profiles are useless it’s that I’ve created a profile one too many times. I only need basic information about you to identify you and if I really wanted to know more I could check out your Facebook profile where you potentially placed more information on your interests and other personal information.
All we need is a centralized place of my profile information and that’s it. We can link to it wherever that is. That’s what’s so great about the Twitter profile. All you have is your name, your city and state and a link to a website of your choice. It could be your Facebook profile, your blog or anything else. The bottom line is that you get to choose where that is. There is another problem that arises when you start examining the usage and limitations of profiles and friend lists.
As Loic Le Meur discussed yesterday, we want a centralized me. Prior to all the social networks and other social sites, we had one website that was our own website. Now as we register for countless sites, our identity is getting spread around the web. We want one centralized location which we have ownership of where we can manage our contacts.
Perhaps Facebook will be the platform that enables us to control all of our contacts from within our own websites but that doesn’t appear to be happening anytime soon. In the meantime the DiSo project was created to develop a solution. The first platform for testing is Wordpress but the system is meant to expand. If you don’t want someone else managing your own content, this new platform will give you complete control.
There is already a combination of various services that can already be leveraged but unfortunately none of them have been perfected. In the meantime, new services are launching daily and a few of them are asking me to recreate my profile. Seriously, don’t ask me again for my information. I think limiting profiles to the information Twitter asks for is sufficient. What do you think?
March 31st, 2008 at 9:26 am
I’m not sure you’d find many who disagree with your idea here - though I’d venture to say that Facebook is too finicky of a silo to store one’s profile — I would suggest a service like OpenID should host this roll. Type in your OpenID and BAM - it should auto populate all of my profile info. One place, one time entry - that would be a perfect world.
March 31st, 2008 at 10:44 am
I agree with you, Nick.
I created a very simple site which domain is my own name (www.JosueSanchez.com). There, I put my main profiles and info. Now, when a new social site asks me for my info, I just type my site’s name.
March 31st, 2008 at 2:18 pm
You hit me back on a series of tweets over the weekend. I agree, why fill out another profile? But what about one master profile to feed all others? I also think there are serious privacy/ownership issues at stake, and though I’m not well read on OpenSocial, perhaps they can/will create standards and safeguard this?
Here are my tweets pasted, to get the ideas out there. Reverse-chronological:
timcourtney: @biznickman And how much of ourselves do we own? How much have I signed away in EULAs already? Does it even matter? Food for thought. 05:55 PM March 29, 2008
timcourtney: @biznickman Exciting, very. But I haven’t stopped to think re: the implications. Our personal lives are vulnerable even to a simple hacker.
timcourtney: What if I could own my own identity server, like OpenID, & keep all my social data there. *I* would own/ctrl it, and it would feed services.
timcourtney: It would make a sweet movie, too.
timcourtney: What will come of the future of data privacy and ownership? The more I live my life online and in SaaS-land, the more I ask that question.
timcourtney: Living life on the social web is weird. del.icio.us bookmarks fed to Facebook, etc. More strategic links get clicked ‘do not share.’
March 31st, 2008 at 2:22 pm
I think that’s right. I also think that could be more and more right for brands. Check out adidas on Facebook. For company info, they offer a link to their wikipedia page.
We can find each others profiles all over the web now, so you’re right we don’t need more. Brands have the same options.
April 1st, 2008 at 1:36 am
Nick, have you looked at Action Streams for Movable Type, which supports 75 social networks, and is both free/open source as well as being decentralized? It seems like we don’t have to wait forever for the frameworks to be created — the tools are there, just waiting for more people to get educated about them.
April 1st, 2008 at 1:39 am
Hey Anil,
No I haven’t. I definitely will check that out! I think there are a lot of solutions, we just need to get people using them as you point out
April 2nd, 2008 at 8:33 pm
*pimping DiSo* since you’re WordPress, you may be interested in wp-diso-actionstream - it’s a port of MT Actionstream for WoWordPress.
April 6th, 2008 at 8:53 am
Check out mEgo.
http://beta.mego.com/site/en_us/login