Google Profiles

Have you guys ever tried editing your Google Profile? Wait, are you guys even aware that you had a Google Profile? Me neither. For a self-confessed Google freak whose lifelong dream is to metaphorically dissect the fabled company’s products and put it back together, I am ashamed to admit that I had no knowledge of this until early last week.

But I’ve since corrected that mistake and now I’ve played around with my web profile and what can I say, I’m liking it. It not only provides you with yet another social network-like page to play around with, but since it’s Google, they’re promising to make your name searchable on, um, Google. Well, on one condition. You have to allow Google Profiles to display your full name first:

I don’t have trouble with it, actually. I like the fact that you can keep your profile a secret if you have to (which is what I’ve been doing; ha-ha! *cue sad trombone*)

Another feature I like is that it automatically searches for your social networks and lets you easily add them to your profile. The first time this happened, I was blown away.

Okay, it may be too much to ask, but what I would really like to see here is lifestreaming, or aggregating all these social networks into one unified feed. Kind of what FriendFeed and the newcomer Chi.mp is doing.

Another new feature I like now is the option to change your profile’s URL to http://www.google.com/profiles/username, where “username” is the name of your Gmail account or an alias for those who use regular Google accounts. For example, the address http://www.google.com/profiles/111762826383748373629 becomes http://www.google.com/profiles/yourname.

Profiles seems to be a bit barebones, but I’m liking it so far. It’s not something I’ll visit to update every other day, but I don’t think it’s meant to be that way. Unless, of course, Google comes up with something that’ll rectify that mistake. So why don’t you try checking out your Google Profile now?