Website Hype

The latest thing from Google is the introduction of a centralized identity management system, to be known as Google Profile, which will be shared by all the squillion Google services that have sprung up in recent years.

Google Profile will be a centralized profile system that will provide personalized information to each Google product you use, sharing information across all of these, and unifying all the Google systems that previously did not share data with each other.

Say Google: “A Google Profile is simply how you represent yourself on Google products — it lets you tell others a bit more about who you are and what you’re all about. You control what goes into your Google Profile, sharing as much (or as little) as you’d like.”

You can include in your profile a nickname, your real name for contacts, occupation, location, links, photo and a short description of yourself. It is interesting to note that each Google profile is public, and this raises the question of whether the profiles can be searched using the Google search engine.

Rumour has it that there is some degree of chaos around Google accounts, and that the profiling system is being introduced to try to sort out the confusion. It seems that the chaos ensued after the introduction of Google Apps, although this is open to debate.

When Google Apps were first introduced, the way you signed up was by means of your gmail addy, so if you ended up getting your own domain, Google then had two different identities for you. This, along with the fact that more recently you don’t have to link Google Apps to a gmail account anyway, suggests that the new system could be a way of rationalizing matters in terms of identities.

It will be interesting to see the extent to which people use the profiles, depending upon how much of their personal information they wish to be seen publicly. It will also be intereting to see how much the new profiling system improves Google Apps from the point of view of the users.