How many profiles do you have? I have one with Blogger, Technorati, Xanga, Blog.com, and I’m sure others. The problem is that each of these profiles only works within the service it was created for. I also have numerous pages that could be considered my ‘homepage’. So which is my ‘real’ URL? Which should I give out to people? Up until now I have decided that question based on who they were and what service they were with. No more.
Tagalag has solved the problem for me. While this may be one more profile to add to my ever-growing list, this one will let me reference all others. I can integrate all my information and URLs together, and the other features provided by this BETA service is large and growing. They do not reveal any part of your email address unless the person viewing your profile already knows your email address (ie, you have to give the site someone’s address in order to find a version of their profile page containing their address). All information is optional. Someone was thinking here.
It isn’t quite a ‘Universal Profile’, because the information you can store is still locked in to what they provide. But with all the Web 2.0 functionality, including a full external API, the only thing they would have to do would be provide arbitrary fields support to perfectly fit the bill.