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?
