Updates for your online identity
How many online profiles do you have… social networking sites, professional networking sites, personal web pages, online communities, membership organizations, and alumni associations?Some have your name, some have your photo, some have your email address, and some have a whole lot more. How many of them have you updated in the past six months? Past year?
For those of us who love to read about the cutting edge online services, I think we’re amazed and a bit curious about the new websites and technologies that promise to consolidate all of your online identities. This is certainly a great idea and will save everyone a lot of time and hassle with setting up various accounts and profiles. Better yet, you will not need to keep them updated on a regular basis.
The waiting game begins for one of these services to develop enough momentum that the various sites with online profiles enable you to monitor and update your profile in one place. It’s going to be a tough choice for many sites to decide whether to participate. Big sites will wonder whether it helps or hurts them to open their data to other websites (for example, myspace tends to remain closed whereas Yahoo boasts open application programming interfaces - APIs). Some sites with very robust profiles such as LinkedIn may not see much benefit in opening up their data (see People Over Process blog entry regarding LinkedIn). Small sites will wonder whether it is worth the time or expense to become compliant with whatever standards are required in order to benefit from these updates. And, all sites will probably remain confused as ever until a certain standard becomes popular and easy to implement.
What is a scrappy entrepreneur or consultant to do between now and then? How can you keep from having lots of outdated profiles out there?
The simple answer is not to have a lot of online profiles. That’s not practical. When you join a new online community or forum, you appear much more credible if you create a quick profile with some of your personal information.
My suggested solution - scrappy and simple - for the time being is to make a spreadsheet or text file with a list of all your current and new online profiles. Put a brief description of what you have in the profile (for example, photo, phone number, or email address) and note when you most recently updated this profile. Once every three months or so (or if you decide you need to update your job listing, email address, or photo), quickly scan your list of online profiles and make a judgment of which ones you need to update and which ones can remain a little outdated.
Even if you want to laugh a the untechie route this solution takes, one other benefit will result from maintaining this list. When a standard for maintaining and updating online profiles does become mainstream, you’ll already know where you have profiles to integrate into the single site or service providing the standard.
All is well.
