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I wholeheartedly agree that the first startup to get profile aggregation and contact management right will solve many power-user's frustrations with multiple profiles. However, I am not sure if this will be the universal killer app that people believe it to be. At this time, myself and many of my friends have profiles on multiple networks but each one caters to a different audience. My LinkedIn profile is for professional contacts, my Facebook is largely for keeping in touch with select college friends and family, and Friendster and Myspace are for everyone else. I don't necessarily want the same level of personal information available on every site. I would however like a way to group each person's multiple profiles under their name and be able to extract relevant contact information for synchronization into my mobile phone via Outlook.

Maybe this idea can be taken further. Is there an open framework where I can create a personal profile on my own server or free hosting service and link to my friends profiles a la Jabber's open model but for the social scene? Could this service provide a comment space, photo sharing, private messaging (via email), and RSS feeds via a shared application API? It seems like this would be very easily to implement if Facebook, Myspace, Friendster, Hi5, and Bebo decided to open their networks to non-local hosted profiles and take the data from your profile and display it using their service's user interface. SPAM and privacy controls would have to be implemented but it would be as simple as: "If you would like to link your profile into the Facebook network please verify your profile via OpenID/OpenID2, email address, or mobile phone number." Granular privacy controls could be implemented by allowed users to group their friends profiles based on how much they want to share. Facebook has already started doing this.

Until this can occur, profile aggregation will be at the whim and mercy of the "terms of service" of the big walled gardens. As it stands, profile link list sites like My Mashable, ClaimID, Spock, and Rapleaf along with a mechanism to push your data to these services is just a hack. Unfortunately, its the only way to go for now.

I use ClaimID to verify what belongs to me online. It's free and let's you add those things online that you authored and also note which items don't belong to you. You can then give your ClaimID URL and annotate your claimed URLs to create an online resume that presents yourself in a more polished way to a potential employer.

Does Slashdot itself have any easy way to extract your list of friends or their posts? I'm interested in what my friends have to say, but I have to go to each one's page to see what's new.

I too want to be able to identify which of my friends from one network are on another, but this will have to depend on whether a person wants their accounts to be linked. FOAF uses email address (or a hash of it) to identify people, but that may not always be an option. In some cases it is not hard to guess what the email address would be and check that against the hash. I wonder if the spammers have bothered with that course.

I favour using something like FOAF to declare what identities you have, but that doesn't provide for verification that it's really you unless you can include something like the http://microid.org/ that http://claimid.com/ uses.

I can foresee some issues with how you link back to the FOAF from each site. There have been attempts at creating a FOAF index, but that opens up more privacy and centralisation issues.

I've played with XFN and FOAF on my site, but have seen very little take-up in the last couple of years. There are some social network sites that incorporate them, but I think you can only link to others in a given site.

There's also clainID to show what pages relate to you, or not as the case may be. In some cases you will be able to prove ownership by setting a tag in the page header. del.icio.us and last.fm support this feature.

Of course, in some cases, you don't want a site to be traced back to you.

I use site specific addresses when I have to register. So far this has only flagged one case where one of those addresses has been used for spam. Meanwhile I get loads to my personal address. That could be from one of a few places including my GPG keyserver entries and my FOAF file. Then there's all the random addresses being used that get bounced to my domain.

Meanwhile I'm playing with claimID. I've used their OpenID facility on a couple of sites. It's preferable to having to register on each site, even if it exposes a little bit about me. I could always register on another service using a more anonymous email address if I want to be less traceable.

there is a new service at http://claimid.com that addresses some of this problem of potential bosses looking you up.

looks like they're still in beta, but i've been seeing it on a few blogs.

http://www.claimid.com/ Thought up by a couple of ibiblio guys, creating a link resume/profile seems the way to go.