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.
9 Responses
Interesting, but it’s not very newbie-friendly. I’d just have links on my homepage to my blog and stuff.
What’s un-newbie-friendly about it? I found it very simple and useful at the same time.
Interesting perspective: Tagalag as a candidate to solve the identity 2.0 problem.
I’m afraid that putting all your URLs together is a weak approach to a very complex problem. Digital identity is much more than a bunch of URL.
If you are interested in solutions that gives you control over your confidential data (e.g. your email addresses) maybe you could consider tools like Sxip, LID, XRI, …
Regards,
Marco
The problem with tagalag is that it uses words like “tag”, and “feed”, which are the most obvious boxes. That’s fine for geeks like you and me, but I’d want my homepage to be ‘idiot-proof’. I want any web-illiterate person who gets that url to find what they’re looking for about me…Yeah, the links to your profile on that page are small and kinda inconspicuous.
RE: Maro, I was certainly not intending to say that integrating your URLs together fully solves the problem! However tagalag is the first free, information-distributed service I know of who’s PURPOSE is profiling. They’re a step in the right direction.
RE: Trev, a homepage is for CONTENT, a profile is for DESCRIPTION. Content-wise tagalag is pathetic, and probably will be for time to come, I don’t use any of my other profiles as ‘homepage’ either, but profiles ARE immensely useful in their own way. The words ‘tag’ and ‘feed’, while they may not be 100% user-friendly yet, MUST become natural lingo to computer users in this age.
BTW, Trev, I’d like to tag you, and if you don’t get an account you name will contain part of your email address 😉 once you edit your profile to a proper name it removes the address-fragment that currently would be visible.
It is a complex problem – I wish I had more time! Marco is right, our identity is more than a collection of URLs, to that end I’ve included location services (sadly US-only at this point) and directional relationships through tags. I’m looking forward to including some of the content from the URLs we create.
Stephen – Thanks for the mention, I got back to your questions on the forum.
Hey there
I consider myself reasonably geeky, and I am having trouble with this site. For instance – how did you add your URLs and Technorati profiles to your Tagalag profile? Am I just missing something here? I got feeds, and incoming and outgoing tags, but where to add Home Pages and stuff?
Tagalag is currently considering adding the ability to directly associate URLs with your profile — but for now you have to put ‘a’ tags directly in your ‘about me’ text 🙂
Hang on – is it just me, or is Tagalag offline? I can’t get to the webpage, and their javascript “Tag me” is not displaying on my blog either…