Google Profiles
They're coming and it will be difficult to get away without having one. Google Profiles will be integrated in most Google services so you have a coherent identity and a simple way to manage your contacts. — "A Google Profile is simply how you represent yourself on Google products …
Context & Ripple Effects
Google has been bolting social features onto individual products one at a time — October's social turn for Google Maps being the most visible example — but each service kept its own notion of who you are. The rollout described here closes that gap: a single Google Profile meant to represent you across Google products, with contact management attached.
The timing matters because Google is simultaneously building things that need named identities. The Knol project, announced this month as an expert-authored rival to Wikipedia (and, per industry reaction, bad news for Jason Calacanis's Mahalo), only works if authors have persistent, attributable identities — which is exactly what Profiles supplies. TechCrunch picking up the story the same day signals how widely the identity-layer move is being read.
First-order effects
- Users gain one editable profile and one contacts list that follow them across Google services, replacing per-product account fragments.
Second-order effects
- Knol's expert-author model gets its attribution backbone from Profiles, sharpening its contrast with Wikipedia's anonymous-editing culture and pressuring Mahalo's human-curated search play.
- Social features like those added to Google Maps stop being siloed experiments and start drawing on a shared user graph, lowering the cost of adding social layers to any Google product.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the profile-and-login layer becomes the strategic chokepoint of a portal-scale platform: whoever owns identity across a product suite controls the social graph every feature inherits, forcing Yahoo and Microsoft to answer with equivalents of their own.
The trend: Web platforms are consolidating around a single sign-on identity layer that spans every product they ship, turning profiles into core infrastructure rather than a feature.