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I’ve been a proponent of user-centric profiles for a long time. Portable profiles stored in transparent database clouds which bi-directionally receive and propogate changes to user-managed profiles are going to be a major feature of the next version of the web.
ProfileBuilder is the latest startup to get into the centralized profile game, launching a few months ago. Today there is news from Mashable and Tech Crunch that ProfileBuilder has launched Profil.es, the search engine/front end for profiles stored at ProfileBuilder.
One of the more interesting part of Profilebuilder are Channels:
Channels contain content in your profile. For example, we are channels that will show information about you, list your eBay items for sale, display your twitter posts, link to your favorite websites, display photos and more.
You can re-arrange, disable and enable any channels in your profile. Making changes in Profile Builder automatically updates all your profiles.
This does indeed work, although I had a difficult time finding the RSS feeds for my Flickr wakeboarding photos sets that I wanted to put in my profile.
I hope that the Contact information is based on some sort of standard like FOAF. Marc Cantor’s People Aggregator is leveraing FOAF which is good to see.
You can customize your own Channel as well. It will be interesting to see how people use this feature. Check out 
My Profile.
I am waiting for a more robust API and bi-directional Facebook/Myspace/Orkut profile updating, in it’s current format, it feels like I’m just filling out yet another profile, with no clear understanding of what it’s value is. This ambiguous value proposition of profile aggregator sites like Profile Builder have historically been their achilles heel and must be addressed before the services take off.
Profile Aggregator companies come and go, there have been more than a dozen since the dot-com bust and I suppose there will be a dozen more before one of them comes up with the right mix of money, resources, partners and technology. It’s exciting to see them get closer to the prize, now it’s time to make them useful, no small task.
