Google Profiles

What exactly is Google up to with their new profiles page?

Are they trying to be more like Facebook?  Or are they trying to give you more control over what people see when doing a search for your name?  Or are they gathering more information about you to increase ad revenues from your web behavior. 

Or am I just being paranoid?

Some tend to think this is Google’s attempt to gather more Personal Identifiable Information that may be used against you sometime in the future. Will it help real estate agents gain traction with Google or other social media sites?

It does seem like this move is slightly strategic on Google’s part, my guess is that Google is hoping we all begin to use this profile page as our universal contact page. 

I spent a few minutes playing around with it, you can check it out here:  http://www.Google.com/Profiles/DrewBurks.  As always you should be cautious about what information you choose to display, you never know who will see it on the internet.

It is clear that Google still has a lot of work to do, but there are already some cool features:

• You can embed pictures from your Flickr and Picasa to your profile page
• Enable the “send a message” feature to allow anyone with a Google account to email you without revealing your email account
• You can easily add links to your other sites, blogs, photo albums and social networking sites

Could Google be working its way into the social networking arena? What do you think?

BTW – I first read about this on the LifeHacker site, read more information here:  LifeHacker.  There is also a great article on the Washington Post, read the full story here.