Google Profiles, hopefully just the beginning
So, Google is launching Profiles across some of their products - right now it is apparently in Shared Stuff, Maps and Reader - some of the bits of Google that have social aspects to them.
It’s super, super basic now - I set up my profile off my Reader account (where it handles any posts that you choose to share). All you get to do is put in your name/handle, you can give it your occupation and location if you like. You can add a series of links (i.e. to your blog or whatever), a 5000 letter description and a small avatar. (it conveniently pulled the avatar I use for gtalk).
One annoying thing is that I could not find where to set up the profile. Fortunately, because the iPhone Reader interface has the “share” link very close to the “star” link, I accidentally share posts all the time and so when I went to my own shared links page, it showed me my profile with a link to edit it - strangely after I removed all the shared links the profile goes away. Shrug. I’ve since found that the place to edit it (at least on Google Reader) is in the “Settings” page under the “Friends” tab.
It’s a nice if super baby step beginning. I think there’s a few directions they could go with this. It doesn’t seem like there’s any way for me to grab the profile badge and embed it on my blog - as an example. That’d be a nice first step to building this out. If I could do that, then adding functionality into that badge would be a great second step - it’d be useful to be able to add google gadgets right into that badge. So, if I wanted to show my stock watchlist or whatever - show the weather - all those google gadgets could start showing up where I wanted them to. They could build a little gTalk gadget in there that would let people IM me right from where they looked at my profile.
They could also start building it out into a competitor for OpenID - a little competition never hurt no one. Build a Profiles API that let people authenticate their identities - between a system like that and Profiles existing ability to retain and display url’s it’d be an interesting way to create a central repository that linked out to all the disparate social networks, forums, etc… that people register for. Add a little ping sauce and the profile could become a simple (or deep) feed to show what sites a given user has updated recently.
All in all, I think profiles could be a very interesting project. It could help unify Google (please - let them unify their UI!) and at the same time form the basis of a distributed social network. I guess that’s a lot to read in to such a light launch, but hey, it could happen, no? Is it crazy?
