Posts Tagged ‘Profiles’

Want to add your location to your Quora profile? You’re in luck. Quora makes adjustments to profile information.

Join Baratunde Thurston (left), The Onion’s Director of Digital and author of How to Be Black, for an entertaining look at creative social media campaigns in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. Other speakers include Morin Oluwole (Facebook), Tim Devane (bitly), and SocialTimes' writer Devon Glenn.   Register now.

MySpace is cleaning up its act by cleaning up its profile layout. The often-lamented clutter and confusion that was splashed across every band, celebrity and doe-eyed teen’s profile has been simplified. The new layouts are still customizable, but they have received a facelift and boast clearer navigation and more organized content. Whether this is enough [...]

As a journalist, former programmer and senior editor at Fast Company, Lynne D. Johnson is a social media maven. She was also a general manager for Vibe and Spin magazines with an award-winning blog. She’s been fusing technology, community and journalism since back in the days of online bulletin boards. It’s no surprise that the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) recently snagged her as their first senior vice president of social media to help guide the industry into the new age of community tools. I recently sat down with Johnson to get her take on how brands should be listening while navigating the social web.
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Profiles are dead. If someone tells you of their new startup idea that involves the creation of user profiles, tell them to quit while they are ahead. It’s not that profiles are useless it’s that I’ve created a profile one too many times. I only need basic information about you to identify you and if I really wanted to know more I could check out your Facebook profile where you potentially placed more information on your interests and other personal information.

All we need is a centralized place of my profile information and that’s it. We can link to it wherever that is. That’s what’s so great about the Twitter profile. All you have is your name, your city and state and a link to a website of your choice. It could be your Facebook profile, your blog or anything else. The bottom line is that you get to choose where that is. There is another problem that arises when you start examining the usage and limitations of profiles and friend lists.

As Loic Le Meur discussed yesterday, we want a centralized me. Prior to all the social networks and other social sites, we had one website that was our own website. Now as we register for countless sites, our identity is getting spread around the web. We want one centralized location which we have ownership of where we can manage our contacts.

Perhaps Facebook will be the platform that enables us to control all of our contacts from within our own websites but that doesn’t appear to be happening anytime soon. In the meantime the DiSo project was created to develop a solution. The first platform for testing is WordPress but the system is meant to expand. If you don’t want someone else managing your own content, this new platform will give you complete control.

There is already a combination of various services that can already be leveraged but unfortunately none of them have been perfected. In the meantime, new services are launching daily and a few of them are asking me to recreate my profile. Seriously, don’t ask me again for my information. I think limiting profiles to the information Twitter asks for is sufficient. What do you think?