Read/WriteWeb has an overview of identity verification services. Having worked with Trufina and Opinity, I am intimately familiar with how they operate and current issues that need to be addressed if these companies hope to succeed.

At first, background checks were a solution looking for a problem. The thinking was along the lines of “We do checks for major corporate HR departments, why not branch out into other (seemingly) logical markets?�

Bzzzt. Wrong answer. None of these companies knew the first think about dating or social networking, and it showed, sometimes painfully, during their pitches to dating site business development teams.

That was two years ago.

Now Sentinel is providing searching capabilities to MySpace’s sex offender alert system. MySpace may use image-analysis software and other means whereby sex offenders using MySpace can be recognized, even if they don’t use their real names in registering. I talked to Riya about using their facial recognition on dating sites for matching purposes, as I understand it talks are underway with most large dating sites although I’m not clear on the status.

Sometimes you need to stare at a problem for a while before the solution becomes apparent. The problem is that others are reacting quicker to changes in the marketplace and launching competitive services for most less cost and overall resources.

I recently heard from Harrison Tang at Spokeo. Spokeo is a content and profile aggregator built by Stanford roommates. No VC, no big development team. Just a few smart people in close proximity learning from the mistakes of others who previously trod down a similar path.

This madness with 20+ profiles is ridiculous and borders on insulting. I can only hope that dating sites will allow for a Master Profile which can be shared among several sites and manageable via a centralized site.

Lots of entrants into the marketplace, everyone is having a hard time monetizing traffic. Either you make money on identity or background checks or advertising. So far, we’re not seeing a lot of either, but it’s early days for identity companies. There are plenty of them in the deadpool. As usual, it’s going to take timing and a unique value proposition to succeed.

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TechCrunch has a review of ProfileLinker, a Boston-based (for now) company working on aggregating your social networking experience.

You tell ProfileLinker your site credentials and it pulls your bio, friends and other information from those sites and centralizes it. You then use ProfileLinker to manage your activity on those networks: aggregate and manage multiple social profiles; discover new social networks and communities of interest within social networks; and receive notification of messages and friend requests from multiple networks.

This is very similar to what Opinity (past client) and various other companies have been trying to do. It’s really so simple, but most companies are too focused on revenue, traffic building or their own in-house myopia when it comes to bridging social and dating networks. Suck in the data, add some value and republish across the net. Strong value proposition that until now nobody has been able to execute on well enough to get traction.

ProfileLinker pulled in my Myspace profile pretty well, there are some bugs in what is imported when you use custom skins for example. The password fields only allow easy-to-hack characters which is a simple oversight I hope they fix quickly.

Users can also sign up for Photobucket during the setup process. You can also import Yahoo contacts or any comma-delimited list from your address book.

ProfileLinker also offers a pc-only toolbar, like we need one more of those. Why not make it a simple bookmarklet?

I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on ProfileLinker. When there is enough value to most casual social networks, we’ll see some big deals happen with partners. Until now it’s good to be small while they get their business model sorted out.

Remember, there have been several sites that have tried to aggregate profiles. It’s straightforward to accomplish, but why should anyone do it? Would you trust a roomful of hackers with credit cards to manage your online life?

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