[cross posted on and Future of Communities]

In the past couple of days I have had conversations with two people representing different enterprise 2.0 services (iUpload and ConnectBeam) about managing the online profile. In thinking about building second generation web communities, I have come to believe that the online profile is at the heart the new web. In the search economy, you need a dynamic digital identity. It is the means by which the right people find you and then connect with you. But in the world of web services, where oh where does my profile live? I know have mini profiles all over the place: I started with my blog and added a profile on Linked In. I thought Linked In might provide me with a good home for my profile but when the fee for service elements were added to Linked In, the really useful aspects of hosting my profile there were lost — people can’t find me unless they pay for a higher level of service. I’ve got mini profiles on Flickr and del.icio.us but they can’t act as profile central. And I’ve just added a new profile to our new Otter Networks service which is built on iUpload and Netvibes.

What I need is a place for my profile that can be plugged into any web service I join. And by plugged in I mean can dynamically draw text, bookmarks, images, and videos from all of these services and build them into a dynamic view of what’s going on now. And I’m not dealing with the issue of residing “inside” an enterprise.

I’ve been interviewing people for a paper and podcast series on new communities and when I ask them about profiles, this is what I hear:

We connect into Active Directory but that is primarily for authority and authentication. We recommend that you build a rich profile on our service and at some point in the future we will integrate this rich profiling back into the enterprise directories.

Is this really how it is going to go? When and how will these things be integrated in a way that really does provide me with a rich, dynamic digital identity that can cross web services as I move in and out of communities of interest and practice?