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.

TimeBridge: Now Synching Your Meetings Through The Web

TimeBridge is a San Francisco-based startup that wants to do one thing very well: help with scheduling meetings.

They originally started out as a deeply integrated Outlook plug-in launched at the end of last year. While initially distinguishing them from other scheduling competitors, I have a feeling that the plug-in requirement added unnecessary friction to using the system.

Now TimeBridge is back with a full web only interface that integrates with your Google and Outlook calendars, with support for other calendars soon. The new version pushes them in the direction of their Montreal-based competitor Tungle, which integrates with more calendars. Tungle also differs by using a P2P system that runs between you and your contacts systems, not on a central server like TimeBrigde.

TimeBridge’s original Outlook plug-in brought their full functionality to your desktop. All of this functionality is now available with the web application, using the plug-ins to pull and push calendaring data between your computer and the web. Updates made on one calendar are reflected on the others and a master calendar is accessible anywhere on the web.

To make a meeting, you log in to their site, and fill out an email-like form consisting of the email addresses for attendees, meeting topic, and possible meeting times. You don’t have to download anything to use TimeBridge, but it helps if you install the plug-ins. If your attendees don’t have a TimeBridge, you can just suggest times based on your personal schedule. If they have TimeBridge integrated with their calendars, though, you can view what blocks of their scheduled time in a sidebar as you choose times.

After you send out the meeting request, each participant gets a full meeting request form in their email. The form lists the possible meeting times, which participants can select as no good, good, or best. Accepting the meeting request places time placeholders on calendars for people with TimeBridge.

The system then picks the best meeting time by points based on attendee responses with ties going to earlier times. If a an upcoming meeting time hasn’t been settled, you can either pick a meeting time or send reminders to the people that didn’t respond. Attendees with TimeBridge will then see the confirmed meeting slot pop up on their calendars.

The video below outlines the process in greater detail. TimeBridge is a funded through a total of $8.5 million by Mayfield and Norwest Ventures.

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