Webware

Google Profiles lets people use the page as a contact conduit without sharing their e-mail address.

(Credit: Google)

Google Profiles have become a bit more socially useful, with the search giant adding an option that lets people offer it as a way to get in touch without actually sharing their e-mail addresses.

To enable the option, click the "Edit profile" link, then check the "Allow people to contact me through my profile (without showing my email address)" option.

Enabling the option adds a "Send a message" link to your profile page, but not just anyone can send a message, though--only those with a Google account.

I sent myself a message; it had this note appended to the end: "This message was sent to you from your Google profile. The sender does not have your email address. If you no longer wish to receive messages from your Google profile, you may edit your settings at http://www.google.com/s2/profiles/me/editprofile."

Also, there are limits. "We've set some limits on how often messages can be sent and received, and you can disable the feature at any time by editing your profile and deselecting the checkbox," according to Google's explanation of the feature.

(Via Google Operating System.)

On the Internet, nobody except perhaps Google Profiles knows that you're a dog.

For those who want to endow their self-description with an extra layer of authenticity--helping put doubts, for instance, over whether their Profiles page may have been created by a scuzzy ex-boyfriend to rest--Google has carried over a feature from its Knol sites that let people verify that they are who they say they are. People who go through the process--Google executive David Glazer is one--get a green "verified name" tag on their profiles.

Google executive David Glazer is among those who have verified their names via Google Profiles.

(Credit: CNET News)

The name verification procedure comes from Google's Knol site, where people can create their own Web pages to inform others about various subjects.

"Profiles will display a 'verified name' badge, if the user has verified their name through Knol. Any user can go through Knol's interface to obtain the verified badge," Google said in a statement.

Upon user request, Google verifies names by checking them against phone or credit card records. It's an experimental feature available in the United States, and there are limitations.

Here's how Google describes the process:

We believe that letting authors verify their name helps increase their credibility and trustworthiness in the eyes of their readers. You are not required to verify your name to use Knol, but if you choose to do so, you will be asked to provide some personal information, which we will use in an effort to authenticate your name.

Today, this experimental (beta) service is only available for U.S. accounts. We currently are also limited to verify names where we have available data, so if one verification method doesn't work, please try the other. Over time, we will add additional verification methods.

For verification by phone number, we will securely pass your name and phone number to a telephone directory database, and if your information matches their records, we'll give you a unique Personal Identification Number (PIN) for use in the verification process.

You'll get an automated phone call on the phone number that you gave us, asking you to key in your PIN, and that's it--you're verified. You must have a phone number in your own name to use this option. Please note that rotary phones, VoIP numbers, and extensions may not work with our PIN verification system.

For verification by credit card number, we will securely pass your verification information to a third-party credit bureau, which will confirm that your information matches a record in their database.

Your credit card will not be charged, this process will not result in an "inquiry" to your credit profile, and no one will look at any credit-rating information or specific financial information in connection with this verification. Google will not see or have access to your credit profile or other credit bureau information. Instead, the credit bureau will simply provide us with a status indicator to let us know whether or not the information matched their records.

Google Profiles pages are mostly dashboards where people can control settings for various Google properties such as Gmail and Google Maps, but the company just gave its Profiles new prominence by letting them be discoverable by search engines. Google also added a "search profiles" box at the bottom of the Profiles page that lets people confine their queries to the Profiles pages.

Google's Profiles page lets people change settings for all their Google services. How socially aware will the site become?

(Credit: CNET News)

Google Profiles got its start as a way to centralize users' settings and self-descriptions. Now Google has now flipped a switch to let search engines discover people's profiles, giving the service a much greater social component.

Before, profiles were effectively invisible to search engines, but last week, the company changed that setting, as ZDNet blogger and iQmetrix programmer Garett Rogers noticed. And Google clearly wants people's profiles to be noticed.

"The more information you provide, the easier it will be for friends to find you," Google says on the page, where people can enter profile information such as the places where they grew up, the schools they attended, links to their publicly available Web pages, their interests, and helpfully for Google's research department, things they can't find on Google.

For now, at least, the profiles page lacks the socially interconnected features of Web sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, and Google's own Orkut. But with profiles now giving a new anchor to Google users' online presence, it's not a stretch to imagine Google headed this direction.

A widget here, a social graph there, maybe a feed to broadcast and spotlight people's online activities, and pretty soon, Google might have another shot at social networking with popularity broader than the Orkut's niche.

Indeed, that's what Yahoo is trying to do with its new socially engaged profiles pages.

Google acknowledged the search visibility move for profiles but declined to shed much light on its plans for profiles.

"Recently, we added the ability to search all public profiles created by users. If a user has checked the 'Show full name publicly so people can find you' box on the profile edit page, their profile is a publicly accessible Web page and is indexed in search results," the company said in a statement.

The company framed the move in the context of its ever-present top priority of improving search. How does Google Profiles do that, exactly? The company offered two reasons to me: First, it lets people control their own presentation on the Web better--something that could well appeal to those who aren't happy that a vanity search on their name leads people to something embarrassing. Second, it could make it easier for people to find others on the Internet.

In case you're one of the millions of people who are sick of Facebook's new design, and want to change the way it looks, there's a simple solution called PageRage. It won't tweak things to look like they did before, but it will let you to do one of the things Facebook has never allowed--theme your profile.

Like competitor MySpace has allowed for years, PageRage lets you customize both the background and design elements on your profile. There are a handful of pre-sets to choose from, all of which you can browse right from the company's Facebook application. To install them you simply click a button and it will apply the skin.

The one caveat of the service is that others must have the extension installed in order to see your special profile. It's also browser specific, so if you have it installed in Firefox but not Internet Explorer you won't be able to see the layout you've picked. However, changes made in either browser will be reflected in both since the information is stored on PageRage's servers.

For now, you're limited to making edits on your profile. In the future, the company plans to let its users customize other people's profile themes, although not for everyone else to see. Parent company Yontoo also makes a handy browser add-on called Sanity Switch that can turn off a user's MySpace profile customizations with a single click, making noisy, or otherwise obnoxious, social-networking profiles a little more bearable.

PageRage's Facebook profile skins are quite classy, although you'll need a special browser plug-in installed to see them.

(Credit: Yontoo Technology)

Google Chrome Backup is a bit ahead of its time. The customizable features in Chrome are so few at this point that it's not hard to memorize your settings. Still, that's annoying, and so this freeware steps into the memory gap. Google Chrome Backup also creates user profiles, useful for mutliuser machines with one log-in.

Google Chrome Backup saves and restores your Chrome settings, and creates new profiles on the fly.

(Credit: Parhelia Tools)

To create a user profile, simply click on the New Profile button and follow the instructions. Once created, you can use GCB to switch profiles, or drag the new profile to the desktop to create a shortcut. Backing up a profile is as simple as hitting the Backup button and choosing a profile to save the settings to. Hopefully, future versions will include the ability to save browsing histories--if it is a current feature, it didn't work during my tests.

The interface is pleasantly reminiscent of Google Chrome itself, with a clean layout and a plethora of options hidden behind slick drop-down menus. I could've done without the ZIP that bundled the small EXE, since it added an extra and unnecessary step to the installation process. That's a minor quibble, though, and the program performed as promised.

With add-ons and other customizations in the offing, though, Google Chrome Backup is well-placed to make sure that insidious errors and benign new computers don't prevent you from making an easy-to-replace record of your favorite tweaks.

Atomkeep is a service that lets you sync, import, and merge your personal profile data across multiple services. It's trying to solve one of the many side effects of service saturation by giving people a central place to manage personal data on a pretty grand scale, like say every popular service you're using right now.

Changed your address? Don't bother logging in to each place to make the change. Instead you can edit your AtomKeep profile (which contains nearly every conceivable field) and then push it out to just the services you want, or all of them at once. You can also bring in your profile data from any service you're signed up for, and merge it in to your Atomkeep profile to push back out to other places. It's actually incredibly simple to manage.

One thing to note is that Atomkeep doesn't hang on to any of your passwords. It's nice enough to keep your username for each service, but that doesn't make having to re-enter your password across four or five of the 23 available services any easier. Ideally, future iterations could adopt a system similar to Roboform or Passpack, with a master password that supersedes your account password to unlock a treasure trove of log-ins. As the service scales to integrate more and more sites, this is going to be the one thing holding it back from being truly user friendly.

In addition to its core profile service, you can also take all your social profiles and stick them on a badge that can be dropped into blogs or e-mails. Other users can then click on any service icon and be taken straight to that profile as long as it's public. There's even an option to drop in your resume, which can be pulled in from services like Facebook simply using your work history, or a fully formatted version from places like Monster and LinkedIn.

Related: Ping.fm blasts messages to five microblogging services at once

[via Lifehacker and ReadWriteWeb]

Manage your profiles across multiple services with Atomkeep, a simple profile management tool.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Populist could be one of the more convoluted products I've seen lately, but it's a whole lot of fun once you know what you're doing.

Having recently taken a look at Plurk, I feel compelled to give it a mention here since the two share some quirks in common. Like Plurk, Populist is a service that's been designed to help people broadcast little bits of information to others in a very structured manner. What makes it different is that it's all about stuff you like in various categories like books, movies, TV shows, and more. Jaiku toyed with this idea a little by letting people add tiny icons to their posts, but Populist takes it a step further by making those icons double as categories.

You begin with 14 categories to start filling in. Every time you update that information other folks will be able to view it along with any of your previous entries as noted with a number that shows up when you mouse over it. You can also expand the types of things you're sharing all the way up to 29 categories with some of the more obscure ones like recipes, rides, and "un-obtanium" for things you'll never be able to afford or get your hands on.

Like any other bookmarking service, the idea is that you can find other people who are discovering things you haven't and track what they're digging. In that regard there's a very loosely useful built-in social component that lets you befriend others and track what they're saving and sharing, as well as capture anything they've posted and add it to your own lists.

The only problem is that exploring the existing community is tough. I found the public stream of people's additions a little difficult to sort through (messages are literally flying back and forth across the screen), but once you're on someone's profile it's a simple affair to drill down into any of their categories and find some things worth clicking and potentially bookmarking.

Populist is the first project from the folks at Particle, who include the founder of uber-hip event service Crush3r (review) and the designer of many of Yahoo's mobile apps. Keep an eye on these guys.

See also: Friendfeed

Populist is a cross between a microblogging tool and a social-bookmarking service. Users of either service will likely be left scratching their heads.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

... Read more

This post was updated at 12:30 p.m. PDT with more detailed information and quotes.

PALO ALTO, Calif.--Facebook plans to unveil a redesign of profile pages in coming weeks to help members cut down on the clutter, executives said here at a press event Wednesday.

Executives also said they'll introduce a beta version this week that will allow developers to test the new pages before it rolls them out to members in June.

The redesign, a preview of which was released Tuesday night, slots member information under five new tabs: personal news feeds; profile information; photos; applications; and a customizable page.

As part of the redesign, Facebook is dramatically playing up the role of its News Feed, which will be the anchor, or first tab, of the new member home page. This shift is meant to make it easier for people to see dynamically changing information from friends and applications first, according to Chamath Palihapitiya, Facebook's vice president of product marketing.

"We see this big trend," Palihapitiya said. "People are publishing feeds all the time, and the point is, people are increasingly telling a narrative, and we want to make that easier for our users to do. And we want people to consume that narrative more easily."

The company will unveil design changes at the risk of angering application developers that rely on Facebook for distribution and member usage. Designers of less popular widgets, for example, could feel somewhat marginalized by Facebook's placement of external applications on a dedicated profile tab.

Company executives, however, said the design overhaul will ultimately give developers more reason to engage with members. "We think there's more opportunity for distribution, but (also) for more meaningful application," Facebook product manager Mark Slee said.

Palihapitiya added that some developers could suffer in the more dynamic environment of News Feeds on member home pages. "Applications that are much more static in nature will not be as successful as they used to be."

Here is an overview of the changes:

The news feed will take the role of the member home page, with one stream of information that people can reformat into three different sizes. From the main page, people can also update information on new Facebook applications, post a wall message, or upload photos from one point next to the news feed.

The reason for that change, Palihapitiya said, is the company's desire to make the home page cleaner and simpler, and allow people to see dynamically changing information first.

Developers can also get front-page play through the news feeds. "Developers can integrate into the feed through the publisher box, so I could draw some graffiti or send a SuperPoke," said Facebook product manager Ruchi Sanghvi.

Facebook moves the static information on members to its second tab, or the information tab. That page will contain detailed data about the person's address, personal history, and preferences. Executives said developers can get creative with new applications that help members tell a story about who they are.

Next is a tab for photos, which are commanding a lot of attention from Facebook users, according to Palihapitiya. So far, he said, members have uploaded 6 billion photos to the site, or 14 million on a cumulative daily basis. "Photos are just one example of an application that could blow up for us," Palihapitiya said.

The profile box tab, or where applications will reside, lets people see a record of the widget they downloaded.

The last tab gives people a choice to customize a page, much like a new feature on the iPhone. People can add a new tab to highlight an application like Scrabulous that they play often. Executives said this is "a huge new opportunity for developers" that could increase advertising revenue.

That said, developers will need to try it out of themselves.

"We are going to give developers a beta period in which they will be able to step into the sandbox and tweak their application," product manager Slee said, "so that they're ready for when this thing gets rolled out in coming weeks."

Facebook first announced last year that it was working on a redesign of members' profiles; now, the social-networking site has unveiled previews of its upcoming new look. The Facebook profile redesigns will start rolling out in the next few weeks.

A look at the new 'About' tab of a Facebook profile.

(Credit: Facebook)

With the new updates, you won't be able to see a member's entire profile on one screen. Personal information about someone will be included on one "tab" of a profile, whereas the "wall"--public messages, developer-created applications, News Feed updates, and other activity-related information--will be on a separate tab. A third tab will link to the photos that the member has uploaded. Facebook has also said that members will be able to create separate tabs for their favorite applications.

Part of this is because of technical issues, Facebook has said, telling members that the changes will make the interface cleaner. "As more and more information is available on Facebook--more photo albums, more applications, and more history--we've realized that Profiles have become cluttered and slow as a result," a release from the site read. "We're trying to make profiles more simple and relevant, while still giving you control over your profile and how you express yourself."

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