Aggregate your Social Networking sites under one roof

After reading on techcrunch about ProfileLinker and then on Business 2.0 beta blog about Spokeo, I decided to try both out and see if they’re about.

ProfileLinker aims to enable you to manage all your social networks in one place, much the same way Meebo’s done with instant messagers. Until recently it’s been in closed beta, but now that’s been opened up I thought I’d give it a go.
I must be missing something, because I can’t seem to manage anything of the social networking sites I’ve added so far. It looks as though the only really unique feature so far is the ability to search user profiles across social networks and even that is not 100%. Granted, they have just gone live, so I suppose everything will come together in time and support. What I was thinking it would allow me to do is check network messages and perhaps update profile details in a central place to propagate throughout the social networks I’ve added, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. From a technical point of view I can see how that would be complicated, so I suppose it’ll take some time still.

However, this got me thinking, do we really need a Meebo for social networks? Social networks, or at least the good ones, have something unique to offer that you can’t generalize it and have the same experience. With instant messaging the goal is always the same, chatting to another person, by providing a general interface to dissimilar instant messaging providers, you’re not losing out on much. Social networks are a different story, each should provide something unique for which you come back for gladly.

Spokeo is a little different, they aim bring multiple social networks into a central place, so if you want to see what your buddy’s been up to over multiple social networks you can go to one place and see what everything together. A little more feasible, but somehow I don’t see it taking off in big way, again for the reason mentioned before about generalizing a unique service.

Would any of you ever consider using a site like ProfileLinker or Spokeo?

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6 Responses to "Aggregate your Social Networking sites under one roof"

ccrazy says:

30 December 2006 at 23:27

Good post! I agree that combining social networks miss one big point … the social atmosphere. for example, myspace is all about pimping my profiles, and Profilelinker and Spokeo don’t provide that.

Like you said, Spokeo seems to solve a different problem. I do find it useful, just like how I can’t live without Bloglines nowadays. Spokeo is basically a simplified Bloglines that allows me to import all my friends (just like how I import OPML files) in one click.

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Laurence Toney says:

31 December 2006 at 12:54

Miguel,

I am the Chairman of ProfileLinker and want to thank you for the post. The team has been working very hard to implement feedback from the users so that we can create the best experience possible.

ProfileLinker is a platform for users to manage their activity on social networks that includes the capability to: aggregate and manage multiple social profiles; discover new social networks and communities of interest within social networks; and receive notification of messages and friend requests from multiple networks.

Here is a summary of the current functionality:

Ã¢â‚¬Â¢ Social Network Management Ã¢â‚¬â€œ ProfileLinker allows users of social networks to manage multiple profiles with the ability to aggregate all information such as user names and URL addresses of public profiles. Users can also aggregate and track information from their friends such as messages received and notification from friends when they update their profile or add content.

Ã¢â‚¬Â¢ Widgets Ã¢â‚¬â€œ ProfileLinker provides users with a full suite of widgets (small additions to a web page that add functionality or data from another source) to distribute the functionality of the platform. Users can place these widgets on their profile pages to add some of the ProfileLinker functionality to their profile pages on social networks.

Ã¢â‚¬Â¢ ProfileLinker Toolbar Ã¢â‚¬â€œ The ProfileLinker Toolbar is available for both Firefox and Internet Explorer and provides a portion of the ProfileLinker functionality in the toolbar. Users can receive notification of messages and friend requests while browsing sites other than ProfileLinker.

Ã¢â‚¬Â¢ Instant Link Ã¢â‚¬â€œ If a user discovers a new social network they would like to join. ProfileLinker makes it very easy to join the new network leveraging information from the ProfileLinker profile. Users can build their ProfileLinker page by automatically importing information from their existing profiles on social networks.

We would appreciate any feedback that you have on the service.

Thanks!

Laurence

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Dave Duarte says:

31 December 2006 at 13:40

I’ll checkit out. Maintaining multiple profiles is time consuming.
I’d like to centralise all my online social networking, but just like in real-life, if we hang around at the same place all the time we don’t get to meet as many people… So I think we have to spread ourselves out.

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Miguel dos Santos says:

1 January 2007 at 16:40

Thanks Laurence for letting us know what’s coming along on ProfileLinker.
I still got my account there, but I’m just waiting for all these features mentioned to go live as I haven’t seen them yet. I’ll probably pop in now a again to see what’s new, but until then only time will tell what will happen.

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aaron says:

19 April 2007 at 02:11

I tried profilelinker just now and it just plain did not work. I was seeing stuff apparently from someone else’s facebook. I don’t know whose, but it wasn’t mine. It didn’t really do anything for last.fm or del.icio.us as far as I could tell.

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Miguel dos Santos says:

19 April 2007 at 12:44

I must say I haven’t used profilelinker since I experimented with it before doing this post, but I’ve found something else to compensate.
http://migueljds.jaiku.com/
I’m loving it. It doesn’t allow me to manage all my registered accounts on the web, but allows me to aggregate all my activities from around the web and those accounts into one space that is both easy to use and easy on the eyes.

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