26 April 2009
Imagine if you wanted to update one piece of information on all of them. That’s a lot of work for such a minor tweak. But if you don’t do it across the board, there will be incorrect information about you out there on the web.

Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Yahoo and now Google.

Imagine if you wanted to update one piece of information on all of them. That’s a lot of work for such a minor tweak. But if you don’t do it across the board, there will be incorrect information about you out there on the web. Information that is always just a search away.

There are calls for profile standards, and even some services that promise to update your information across multiple networks in one fell swoop. Facebook is getting closer to that than anyone else with over 250 million users and rising, but Google may have well as have taken a crowbar to its knees today.

By adding its own profiles to search results on Google for names, Google has created yet another profile that we need to maintain. While that’s good for Google — Google Profiles have been around for a while, but no one used them — it’s more work for us, and seems to all but ensure that one network will not rule them all.

And we can all say that we’re going to drop all networks besides the one we use the most, but we won’t. For most people, the social graph is different on each of them, and there’s some reason to stick around there. If nothing else, it’s more of a pain to remove yourself from a service than it is just not to update your profile anymore.

And services like Facebook Connect offer the promise of transferring your profile information to other services. But Google it can act as it wants, say the right things in public, and add links to Facebook under your Google Profile result, but do you really think Google wants Facebook winding up as the one profile you maintain? No.