Techcrunch » Blog Archive » ProfileLinker Takes Meebo Approach to Social Networking
Techcrunch » Blog Archive » ProfileLinker Takes Meebo Approach to Social Networking
Here’s an idea that I discussed with some friends at Yale about a year ago… Glad to see that someone has implemented it. I agree with Michael that the challenge will be how to build relationships with the MySpaces of the world while still building their traffic. It also puts MySpace in an interesting situation. A user will want to use a service like this to manage their online profiles, and is there anything in MySpace’s T&C that prohibits use of a tool to manage one’s profile? If they do restrict it, for me as a user, I might well choose to just not keep a presence there as I would rather use a service that makes it easy for me to maintain. Easy maintenance provides more value for me and the people in my network. In a sense, some sites are already doing this a bit by enabling you to have your personal blog feed as part of your profile. Why not let you also pull other data in as well from another location? I wonder if their fear of dropping pageviews will cause the big players to put up fences, enabling a new company to create a foothold. Thinking about how I have a Linked In Profile, MySpace Profile, Friendster Profile, and Facebook Profile, I’ll be using ProfileLinker soon 
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December 30th, 2006 at 4:45 pm
I think you’ll be interested in Spokeo. It doesn’t allow you to manage anything (thus, no violation of T&C or any need for passwords). However, it does aggregate all the publicly available content from your friends into a news stream.
You can see it as a personalized Google News about your friends. Even more appropriately, you can see it as a RSS reader for social networks. If you have more than 10 friends, you’ll find Spokeo very useful.
December 31st, 2006 at 5:43 am
Sean,
I am the chairman of ProfileLinker. Thanks for the nice post on the service. The team is working very hard to implement new functionality based on the feedback from power users of social networks such as yourself.
Please let us know what we can do to make the experience better. The team would really appreciate the feedback.
Thanks!
January 3rd, 2007 at 5:47 pm
Social networking in Web2.0 context is really becoming like infrastructure over which services are being delivered.
We should start moving towards open standards for social networking. My list of friends after all remains the same whether I am on MySpace or Facebook. There can be privacy controls to separate my high school buddies from professsional contacts.
This will really help innovation in the space as every new startup won’t have to spend its time getting users but can focus on delivering value.
Though, I am not sure how it will happen. The big startups have little incentive to participate - as their valuation is closely tied to their user base.