Marketing Pilgrim

Each time you sign up for a new site you create a profile which is unique to that site. You’ve got to upload a picture and fill everything out. It’s a pain to keep up with it all, which is why I haven’t yet added my picture to my Digg or LinkedIn profile.

MySpace has launched the Data Availability initiative which can make MySpace your home base for profiles. With this new initiative you’ll be able to integrate elements of your MySpace profile on partner sites that so far include Twitter, eBay, Yahoo! Instant Messenger, and Photobucket.

So if you have a MySpace account you could easily add information from your profile onto other sites and control what information you want to share. This will enhance what’s available on your eBay and Twitter profiles. For example, Twitter only gives you space for a small picture, your location, and URL. Oh, and you can customize the background image and colors on your profile page.

Your MySpace profile can be your home base. You update your MySpace page and it will update the other sites automatically. They become your profile host and life will be more simple for you. For social network addicts this could make signing up for yet another site much easier. Hopefully other sites will join the partnership (I’m not holding my breath for Facebook to since this is an attempt to compete against them).

It’s a similar idea to Google’s OpenSocial network, which MySpace is a part of. That group sets standards so developers can build applications for social networking sites that will work across many different sites. However, this is not sharing between sites as much as sharing information from MySpace to other sites, and not the other way around.