They’re coming and it will be difficult to get away without having one. Google Profiles will be integrated in most Google services so you have a coherent identity and a simple way to manage your contacts.
“A
Google Profile is simply how you represent yourself on Google products
— it lets you tell others a bit more about who you are and what
you’re all about. You control what goes into your Google Profile,
sharing as much (or as little) as you’d like.”
Until now, you
could create profiles in Blogger, orkut, Google Groups, Google Co-op
and all of them could contain different information. You could also add
photos in Gmail, Google Talk and orkut, so the situation started to
become confusing.
Profiles
are public and contain basic information about yourself: a nickname
(the real name is displayed only to your contacts), your occupation,
your location, a list of links, a photo and a short description. They
are embedded as iframes in pages that showcase user-generated content (personalized maps, shared bookmarks).
It’s not a stretch to see that these profiles are the perfect host for your activity and your public activities could become a part of the profile
(uploading photos to a public album, bookmarking web pages, posting a
new blog post). It’s basically FrindFeed’s widget that can be contemplated at Paul Buchheit’s blog.
A
side-effect of the public availability of your profile is that people
can find it. “Can people do a Google search for my name and find this
profile? It depends. If you put your full name in the Nickname field,
pages on which your profile appears may be returned as results by
Google.” You can already find more than 100 profiles
attached to Google Maps pages. Maybe Google will even create a
directory for profiles and start to suggest friends based on personal
descriptions, location and activity streams.
This post is fetched from: Google System