Google Profiles Adds Photos, Inching Closer to Lifestreaming
Rolfe Schewe sent me a heads-up on Twitter tonight that Google Profiles now has added photo streaming. All you need to do is point Google toward Picasa, Flickr or any other photo sharing service that supports feeds and it will pull in your public photos.
Context & Ripple Effects
Google Profiles began as a standalone identity page in 2007. By connecting it to external photo feeds, Google turns that earlier profile offering into a surface that can reflect activity maintained elsewhere.
The move matters because it lowers the cost of keeping a Google profile populated: public images from Picasa, Flickr, or another feed-enabled service can appear without being uploaded again.
First-order effects
- Google Profiles users can display public photos from supported services while continuing to manage those photos at their original host.
- Picasa, Flickr, and other feed-enabled photo services gain an additional profile-distribution channel for users’ public images.
Second-order effects
- Google makes the usefulness of its profile page depend less on creating content inside Google and more on aggregating activity from services users already use.
- Photo-sharing services that expose standard feeds become easier to feature in profile aggregators, while services without compatible feeds are less readily surfaced.
Third-order effects
- If profile pages increasingly aggregate public updates from multiple services, the competitive value of a profile shifts toward identity and presentation rather than exclusive control of every piece of content.
The trend: Lifestreaming is pushing web profiles from static identity pages toward aggregators of public activity maintained across separate services.