ProfileBuilder: Manage Your Profile, Not Accounts

nullWith a plethora of social networks for everyone from knitters to dog lovers, managing our increasing number of long tail profiles is a huge pain. The problem of managing a fragmented identity has been attacked two ways: creating a new master account (OpenID), aggregating identity through search (Spock, Wink), or aggregating management of all your accounts on one site. The latter solution has attracted quite a bit of attention with sites like Profilactic, ProfileLinker, and Loopster.

ProfileBuilder is another startup looking to help solve the identity problem by providing one place to manage your personal information. They gave party goers a sneak peek of their identity management tool at the TC 9 party at August Capital. During the beta preview, approximately 5,000 profiles have been created, and ProfileBuilder has received more than 450,000 page views. Now the site has launched to the public.

ProfileBuilder isn’t just about getting friend status updates or single login access, but more about easily controlling what information shows up on what sites. However, they do have an API that allows anyone to build a program to push updates from your profile to other social networking services. The service creates a master profile where you can catalog your biography, photos, links to other services, blogs, and even create new kinds of information pages. You can expose this information to people across the net through an embeddable badge (like View my Profile). When you place the badge on a site, ProfileBuilder knows and lets you choose what type of information gets exposed through the embed on that site. You can manage all your embeds through their website.

Encouraging people to use the service by embedding profiles across the web is no doubt a first step in toward serving as a total online identity solution. Plaxo has been gunning for this distinction as well, and certainly more companies will want to serve as the focal point for identity on the web.

Saturday Morning: I’m Watching Tubecast

Good find over at Go2Web2 - Tubecast.tv is a new Internet video startup that, like others, is building a user interface layer on top of the online video services like YouTube, Veoh, etc.

For the most part the site has grabbed a lot of content from those sites and organized it into channels ranging from music videos to martial arts. Videos are shown on a schedule like normal television, although you can skip ahead.

What’s cool about it is that you can watch videos full screen with a click, and browsing to new content is much easier than using the video sites directly. This isn’t for searching, but it’s an excellent time waster if you want to browse pre-selected content.

What I like best about sites like this is that they are completely browser based and no download is required. I’m thinking Joost is going to have to move in this direction eventually. They can offer lower quality video via the browser, saving the higher definition content for the P2P application

The site’s blog is here.

Verwandt.de: German Geni Clone

Germany is starting to build a name for itself as the startup cloning capital of the world. German clones of popular U.S. services keep popping up. Twitter (Frazr, Dukudu). and Facebook (Studi.vz) are two recent examples. TechCrunch contributor Gregor Hochmuth termed these German clones Copy/Paste innovation.

The latest German clone, Verwandt, means “related” in English. Its design and functionality is very similar to its U.S. counterpart, Geni. In fact it goes well beyond similar - Verwandt is a Geni clone dressed up in some cuddlier graphics. It uses the same layout and quick sign-up flash-based registration form as the U.S. site. They’ve also copied the family tree navigation and profile pages. Take a look below to judge the similarities for yourself.

The motivation and business process is clear: 1) Find a proven concept in the U.S. or elsewhere, 2) Clone the service, 3) Profit. And they have been profiting off these clones quite a bit. The Samwer Brothers have invested in Alando.de (eBay clone sold to eBay) and Studi.vz (Facebook clone sold for $100 million). They’re also investors in Frazr. See Gregor’s post for a longer list of clones. Certainly other countries, including the U.S., engage in their fair share of cloning as well. However, the flood of clones coming from Germany suggests an unwelcome trend.

Verwandt seems to be cloning some of Geni’s success as well. They have over 1.5 million profiles in under 2 months of operation, compared to Geni’s 5 million. They’ve also secured an undisclosed level of financing, most certainly helped by Geni’s $100 million valuation.

There’s a lot of great innovation going on outside the U.S., but this rip and flip mentality may prove short-sighted as the real McCoys continue to innovate and internationalize, and solid German startups like Xing are forgotten in the controversy.