moar internets

…well web stalkers and reputation managers…

I finally got around to updating all of my profiles, when a friend told me about extendr. The cool thing about extendr is that it gives a nifty little tour option for your links. People can explore your world without actually visiting the Web sites. The browser plug-in to bookmark links to your profile seems to work, but it puts all the links into a “from the web” category. So you need re-categorize all the links into the appropriate categories. Luckily, this is simple in extendr.

extendr is missing feeds. Why not let someone subscribe to updates? The 250 character limit is constraining too. I haven’t seen any of the extendr profiles ranking in the SERPs for name searches either. It looks like that is going to take some time to achieve. The extendr pages do get indexed, however.

extendr could be used in so many ways. People know you from so many different aspects of your life. Manage your personal brand. Find and express your individuality through all the noise. Use it for your business, product.

It will be interesting to see which profiles and aggregators will be adopted on a large-scale in the next few years (and what new ones will appear on the scene). If anything, extendr has make me realize how many profiles I have laying around the Internet. Its a great place to keep it all tidy.

So I’m playing with the new Google Profiles today. So far seems like yet another profile to maintain. Possibly handy if you have a relatively common name. Probably not handy if you are say, John Smith.

If you have a Gmail account, the profile URL can only be customized as your gmail ID name or a series of numbers to mask your ID (otherwise people could infer your email address). If you use a non-gmail account, you can customize the profile URL to whatever your little heart desires. Which is what I did.

Search visibility is pretty much instant, but profiles, for now, are located at the very bottom of the page. I purposely set up my URL for my short name, Jacque, instead of Jacqueline to test. I have visibility for both names in the SERP.

Here is the result for me signed into a different Google account. Note the sponsored link:

Here is the profile on the bottom of the 1st page in the SERP. Note the links to the other Social Networking sites.

A search for my short name, Jacque shows the profile result along with with my full name:

Jackie Urick is a common misspelling of my short name. While I have thought about “dominating” search for “Jackie Urick”, once I realized a few years back that the only other person with my name is some high schooler in Montana (prolly graduated by now even), I didn’t sweat it. Besides, I use “Jacqueline” for my professional name.

What is nifty is that MY Google profile is appearing for the search “Jackie Urick” despite the fact I didn’t list it as a nickname in the profile.

TAKE THAT JACKIE URICK IN MONTANA.

You can visit my profile here: http://www.google.com/profiles/jacque.urick