How many online profiles do you think you have right now? I know, too many to even count! Such is the case with anyone that uses Web 2.0 sites these days.

Whether you have boatloads of profiles or just a few, you need a way to manage your profile information. Here are some tools that you can use to share your profiles online, kind of like a virtual business card.

Tell us in the comments how you share your profiles online.

Customize Your Twitter Background

Twitter has become a popular platform to share your profile. Users are creating customized image backgrounds with all of their vital contact information and using their Twitter account as their primary social profile.

Instead of just using a generic image of some pattern or photo of the dog or kids (guilty as charged here), many people are making their own business card-like backgrounds with detailed biographical information, self-portraits and more contact details. It’s rather simple too, you just edit an image you want to use and add your bio and contact info, then upload it to your Twitter profile. Here’s an excellent example.

Use Your Social Networks

LinkedIn is the network of choice for many professionals. It’s becoming increasingly common to see people using the URL to their LinkedIn profile instead of links to their own blog or website.

Facebook and MySpace profiles are commonly used, but far too many companies block these two social networking monoliths, which could make them a bad choice for your primary online profile.

Aggregate Your Information

Retaggr is a new online profile service that allows you to add all of the social networks that you belong to and create a virtual business card. The cool thing is that this isn’t a static display, the card can actually reveal recent activity on the social sites that you belong to.

FriendFeed has become one of the most popular aggregators for social networking sites, so naturally it’s also become rather popular for sharing your online contact information. The URL is easy to remember, http://Friendfeed.com/username. The best thing about this method is that all of your social networking feeds are available on there too.

MyBlogLog’s widget provides a versatile profile page that shows all of your points of contact in one place. MyBlogLog is used primarily by bloggers, so this might not be the best solution for non-bloggers.

Google Profile was announced almost a year ago by Google and has ever so slowly been showing up in some Google services such as Shared Stuff, Google Reader and Google Maps. The promise was made to centralize all of your profiles for various Google services as well as other services into one place. Sounds nice, but it sure is taking a long time to roll it out to all of their services.

Plaxo has been around for many years. It’s well-known as a social aggregator because of its Pulse feature which was released before FriendFeed, but its primary function has always been address book synchronization and contact management.

Many people are using their Plaxo profile as their virtual business card because it serves many purposes. Not only does it share all of your contact information, but it allows your contacts to stay informed of any changes that you make to vital details such as where you work, email addresses, phone numbers, etc. It also allows them to keep in sync with the changes that their contacts make, which is most useful. The pulse social network aggregation is just an added bonus.

Use Online Business Cards

rmbrME is trying to convince people to go as far as throwing away their real business cards by using their online business card service. Their claim is that your information online is more interactive than a paper business card which can get lost too. While a cute marketing concept, I think it’s silly to ever think real business cards will ever go the way of the DoDo bird.  Is there a potential place for this type of service where people can exchange their information by beaming their mobile devices at one another? Sure, why not.

DropCard is another virtual business card service that’s trying to convince people to give up their old habits of paper business cards. Once again, there are some benefits to the service, but traditional business cards are here to stay.

Create an About Me Page

One of the most commonly used methods of sharing profile and contact information appears to be the About Me page on blogs and websites. Most of them aren’t done very well though; they only contain the most elementary bits of information. However, the trend lately has been to create more socially dynamic and engaging About Me pages. Here’s an example from Julia Roy:

At first glance it appears to be the usual About me or Contact me page. There’s a personal and professional biography and the all-important email address. Then you’ll start to notice more social aspects. There’s the Twitter feed, of course. Then it jumps to what she calls A Digital Life, which shares all of her most commonly used social networks with links to her profiles on each site.

The other interesting and ultra-informative section that you don’t see that often is called Digital Ink, which is where Julia shares links to some of the articles and interviews that involve her or her website. It’s a fun and different way to learn about someone, through the eyes and experiences of other people.

An About me page doesn’t have to be the usual dull and static page that we encounter all too frequently. It can be a dynamic and active webpage with information that’s updated all the time. It can present not only who you were in the past and who you are today, but also link to what you’ll be doing in the future.

There are many ways we can choose to present ourselves and share our contact information online. This will continue to evolve as new services enter the scene and address our need to manage our profiles and contact information.

Perhaps it would be a good idea to have an aggregator that works with your OpenID account so that all of your contact information is centralized and available for use on any new service that you join. It would save a great deal of time and typing, that’s for sure. In the meantime, we will continue to spend a lot of precious time editing and updating our profile information all over the Web in an effort to keep everything consistent and up to date.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:SocialThing Raises $300K in Early-Stage FundingGoogle Social Graph API Spotted in the Wild: Plaxo Public ProfilesWink Adds Twitter to its SearchSocial Network Moli Raises $29 MillionPeepsnation is Mobile Hot or NotOtherEgo Launches - YouTube, Facebook, MySpace in One PlaceAttendi Puts New Spin on Social Search

Slowly but surely, the entertainment industry is grasping the fact that the Internet is the most important promotional tool they’ll ever have. Shows like South Park and Jackass already have websites on which fans can see full episodes for free; now, something similar is planned for Saturday Night Live.

According to Broadcasting & Cable, SNL executive producer Lorne Michaels and NBC are planning to develop an on-demand Web site that will feature clips from the popular show. Nothing is certain at this early stage, but it seems that they’re planning to offer clips taken from the show instead of full episodes, as well as previously unaired bloopers and rehearsal clips.

What prompted NBC to try this approach was the immense (surprise, surprise) success of SNL episodes on Hulu. However, B&C reports that monetizing this project is one of the biggest obstacles for NBC. I’d say that controlling the content yourself instead of having people share it somewhere else on their own is a good enough reward.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Hulu to Live Stream Presidential Debates and Offer Video ArchiveWindows Live Offers Web ID Authentication: Will this Hurt OpenID?The Daily Poll: What’s Your Level of Interest in Lifecasting?Conan O’Brien to Stream on NBC.comMTV and MySpace Launch the Media Circus DebatesApple iPod Ads Are The New HitmakersCrackle’s New Channel is a SNL Wannabe

Source:Mashable!

Live video streaming service Stickam is expanding into mobile, announcing today that users will now be able to stream videos to their account with a cell phone. Similar to services like Qik and Flixwagon – who offer mobile video streaming exclusively - the service is initially being offered with Nokia N95 and S60 series phones.

Like other Stickam videos, mobile streams can be embedded elsewhere with copy and paste code, so live streamers can place their videos on their own websites and blogs. Broadcasters will also be able to view stats like the number of people watching as well as their chat room from the Stickam Mobile application. For users looking to view Stickam mobile video streams, they can be found under a new “Mobile” section that has been added to the “Live Streams” section of the site.

The addition of live streaming by Stickam poses the age old question: is this a business or a feature? While services like Qik and Flixwagon are trying to build communities exclusively around mobile streaming video, Stickam has simply added it as a feature to what is already a relatively popular video site. Broadcasters will flow where the audience is, and for now, Stickam would appear to have a significant edge on the upstarts:

Meanwhile, if some of the bigger fish in the space like YouTube and UStream add mobile video streaming, the opportunity will get even smaller for the likes of Stickam, Qik, and Flixwagon. For its part, Stickam does offer a somewhat unique business model - the “pay-per-live” program it rolled out earlier this year.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Stickam’s Webcam Facebook AppStickam Launches Stickam ListingsCuStickam - Stickam Profile EditorMashMeet LA Caught on Tape!fix8 Signs Deal with StickamStickam, YouTube, SecondLife do the SundanceAT&T Video Share Marries Live Streaming with Voice Calls

Source:Mashable!

In this flurry of bad economic news it’s nice to see a project fresh with enthusiasm; a simple, cool idea (which might not even have a business plan) that might turn into a nice resource in the future.

Woices is one such project. It allows users to create and share audio snippets linked to a specific geographical location or a real world object. This, however, is where it gets interesting. I would assume that this would mean hearing what the Cathedral de Notre Dame sounds like, but Woices has a very different, slightly artistic, concept altogether. The users record words - perhaps a poem, some interesting info or advice - related to the location in question. It still sounds like a cool idea, but I see this as an unnecessary restriction; why not let people record any sound related to any location if they like?

At Woices, these audio files are called echoes, and the community is called the echosphere. You can search the echosphere through a geographically organized directory or on a map; you can also find out what the freshest and most popular echoes are.

Despite having a cool idea, Woices displays two very common flaws; first, it’s nearly empty. Yes, yes, a community doesn’t grow overnight, but the site would be so much more fun at this stage if it had at least a couple hundred (instead of a couple dozen) audio files available. Second, most of the files available are named in Spanish. It’s not a big deal since the site is available both in English and Spanish, and the default is English; again, when the community builds up, there will be more echoes from all around the world. Right now, though, it will surely drive away some frustrated users who don’t understand Spanish.

Having a community created database of audio recordings tied to certain geographical locations sounds like something that probably ought to happen, but perhaps never will; it’s one of those concepts whose success is really hard to predict. Hopefully the authors will manage to pull it off and, as they put it, make the world a more interesting place.

We first reported on Eyealike a year ago when they launched their "dating service based on looks only" application. The idea was simple: upload a photo of a hottie and Eyealike will find other hotties on the dating service that match the "features" of the hottie you uploaded.

Today Eyealike is announcing the launch of Eyealike VisualAd which aims to help social networks and other content sites generate more revenue based on matching images on the page to ads that will result in better results than standard display ads. The company claims that using VisualAd you could see up to 15 times higher earnings.

If we think about Google AdWords which uses contextual matching to provide ads that match the text on the page, VisualAd wants to do the same thing using the images on the page. With text there’s no worry about error in processing, we will need to see just how close Eyealike can match ads to images that are processed by a machine.

Eyealike VisualAd is a plug-in technology and pricing varies based on size and selected features. I could see Keibi offering a similar product in the future.

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Social sites like Facebook supposedly capture our social graph: the collection of people we connect with on the web. But they don’t really let us do anything with the information. Sites like LinkedIn might let us message people a bit more easily, but there are no on-board tools to segment our information. What if, for instance, I want to mail everyone I know who is a prospective speaker for my upcoming conference? Can’t do it. I just figured out how. BatchBook.

I’ve been using BatchBook as a contact management system for a bunch of months. It’s web-based, so I can access it anywhere, but it also lets me download my contacts into a CSV file to use in other ways. Where it gets cool is that it’ll let me segment out a list based on tags that I’ve created, and download that as a segment. So, I can mail exactly the kind of person I want, based on any kind of tag I’ve given them: geography, where we’ve met, their capabilities, etc.

With BatchBook, I can get in there and do some extra things, too. They have a concept called “SuperTag.” Anything that you’ve used as a tag can be turned into a small database of its own, such that I can have a tag like “CommunityManager,” with subfields like “type,” so that I can make some of my community managers “enterprise,” some “startups,” and some “freelance.”

In the end, what I’m doing is making a database without having to be a database administrator. What does this mean? Apply it to how you do business, and how you will do business in the coming economic downturn. Maybe now’s a great time to get together all the web developers you know, all the virtual assistants, all the people in DC, etc. Having good contacts and knowing who to reach and how is always important. When you absolutely need the information, it’s indispensible.

You’ll no doubt recommend any number of applications that can do this differently, in Ruby on Rails, on my iPhone, whatever. What I like about BatchBook is that the people behind the product actually listen to their customers (me!), and that they’re growing the product slowly around expressed needs. But most of all, I like that it’s solving a need of mine: getting my social media “friends” into a database where I can actually reach out to them the way I want, and with lots of variation on the them.

Chris Brogan blogs at [chrisbrogan.com]

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:BatchBook Offers Customizable Contact Management Software270+ Tools for Running a Business Online

As we watch the economy do what economies do - have growing pains and adjust to challenges - it becomes ever more apparent that doing things the old way just won’t work anymore. That is true of many of the old ways, especially when it comes to how companies advertise and grow their business.

It is my opinion that the return on investment (ROI) for traditional advertising will continue to shrink, even as companies using traditional advertising methods continue to throw money at ads in hopes that their company will survive these choppy financial seas. Instead of panicking and clinging to the deflating lifeboat of old ideas, now is the time to stand firm and innovate.

Evaluating the Situation

Before a company can find success in branding and marketing through non-traditional means like social media, companies and entrepreneurs need to reevaluate how they define ROI. Sure, there is always investment, but instead of thinking of this investment solely as monetary, also consider the investment you can make in time, staff, creativity, participation, and other less tangible resources. In this economy “investment” could be replaced by innovation, inspiration, involvement, or interaction for a different and fresh form of ROI.

Social media is often accused of taking a “touchy feely” approach to advertising, marketing and brand management. In a sense this is true. The ways of measuring ROI in a social media campaign are much more indirect than a cost based traditional model. In part this is because the cost of social media to grow your company is relatively low and consists mainly of intangible things like proper use of your time.

If the company is large enough, it may entail the cost of hiring someone to manage your social media efforts. If the company is a small to medium business or an entrepreneur or sole proprietor, most will find that after an initial training session with a good social media guide they can use existing staff to manage social media campaigns. This is a huge cost saver that can be carried over into a reduction in traditional advertising expenses as well.

Measuring ROI

One of the most tangible ways to measure ROI is site analytics. If you have a site that is starting a social media campaign, make sure to get a good analytics program installed, like Google Analytics. As you start each campaign, make sure to associate it with tags and key words you can track in your analytics program.

You can do the same for on-site CPM advertising, like the ever popular Google Adsense. By associating each ad block with key words and campaigns, it makes it easier to measure where the money and visitors are coming in from. Coupled with a great stats program like Mint or similar, there is no reason you can’t develop your own in-house ROI study as you embark on your first social media campaign.

Enhancing ROI

One of the many ways to enhance your ROI from social media campaigns is to consider transparency. Since it is very hard to hide behind an image these days (go ahead and Google your company name plus the word “sucks” or “stinks” or other negative connotations and see if anything comes back), the more transparent a company and its top level staff can be without giving away company secrets, the better.

A fantastic example of transparency helping a company’s numbers is that of BuzzAgent. They were so invested in the idea of changing how they approached their brand they did a 90 day experiment that showed measurable gains (and other interesting data) through openness and interaction.

Additional Benefits

If you aren’t sold on the idea of fully embracing social advertising, consider the intangible benefits of a brand campaign as well, including how social media can save you money indirectly. By becoming more involved with your brand and embracing both the negative and the positive (realize you no longer control the conversation about your company) you can stop problems before they start.

By giving your customers access to you through social media and using it to channel everything from customer support to sales and hiring, you will find that you are gaining income and stopping some tradition areas of corporate monetary hemorrhaging. All without spending vast amounts of extra money on ads no one stops to watch, listen to or read anyway outside of Superbowl Sunday. I’d say that’s pretty good indirect ROI, wouldn’t you?

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:appssavvy Releases New Tool to Link App Developers with AdvertisersAnother Cautious Report – Global Social Networking Ad Spend Estimates LoweredAustralian Ad It Last Comes To AmericaSave $100 off SWAT Summit on July 17th in San FranciscoSocial Media Marketing Summit is Almost HereWhat’s Next in Online Advertising?Drama 2.0 Predicts What Won’t Happen in 2008

Fuser, but there’s a critical distinction to be made. NutShellMail will not get blocked by your company’s firewall which means you can now get all of your emails and messages from all of your personal email accounts as well as your MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn social networking accounts.

How does it accomplish this? Well, the secret is that it doesn’t actually require you to connect and login to each of those sites and accounts. That’s the important aspect to this service because that requirement is what prevents you from accessing sites that your company firewall blocks according to corporate policies. NutShellMail bypasses these border patrols by logging into all of your accounts from outside the firewall and then sends an email to your company email address (if you choose) or to any personal email account if your company allows it, of course.

You control how often you get these email updates too. You can choose to receive them hourly or at noon or whenever. Since you never have to login to any of these personal email accounts or social networking sites, then you are not not breaking any company policies. Not technically anyway. Here’s what the email summary will look like:

Being in the information systems industry for many years, I think this is an excellent idea. While it might mean losing some productivity time for employees due to the fact that they will take time to read their personal emails and social networking messages, the amount of time will be dramatically reduced compared to the standard method of surfing to each site and logging in.

Here’s a demo of how the service works:

No matter which browser you prefer, there’s a plethora of ways to customize the way you surf the Web. There are countless plugins, extensions, toolbars and more. Some of these are easy to install while others require a little more effort.

We’ve put together a list of some of the best instructional resources for the most popular browsers today, including Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Safari, Opera and even the still wet behind the ears rookie, Google Chrome.

Internet Explorer

ie Tips - Shares a ton of quick tips for customizing Internet Explorer.

Official Browser Settings - Overview provides plenty of useful information on all of the settings for IE that most users never touch. Learn what they do and perhaps fix some problems you’ve been experiencing.

Official IE Developers Blog - Shares new tips and tricks all the time on their official blog for Internet Explorer.

Internet Explorer Toolbar - Tutorial covers what you need to know about IE’s toolbar.

Top 11 ie Add-ons - Covers a list of cool tools you can add to the IE experience.

Firefox

Customize Firefox themes - Provides a large collection of new themes for changing your Firefox look and feel.

Mozilla’s Official Way to Customize Firefox - shows undocumented features and ways to customize their browser.

How to Use GreaseMonkey - A must-read if you truly want to take your browsing to the next level.

Office Firefox Add-on Library - Contains an amazing amount of add-ons that you can install with a simple click.

Mashable’s List of 30+ Firefox Extensions - Extensions that enhance your browsing experience.

Safari

How to Customize Safari Beyond All Reason - Offers up a bunch of solutions to common annoyances with Safari as well as other cool tips. Funny title too.

How to customize the Safari Toolbar - Covers everything you need to know about the toolbar.

SafariStand - Adds dozens of extra features to the Safari browser.

eHow’s How to Customize Safari covers the basics of Safari preferences here.

YouTube video - Shows you how to customize the Safari Toolbar.

Opera

Opera Mini - How to install and configure Opera Mini for your mobile device

Official Opera Tutorials - Tutorials on how to customize the Opera browser.

Opera Widgets - Shows the best ways to customize Opera Widgets.

Extending Opera - Demonstrates several ways to get the most out of Opera.

Opera Mail Tutorial - A nice visual tutorial on the Opera Mail system.

Chrome

Google Chrome Forums - Has a tremendous amount of ways to trick out your Chrome browser

Digital Streets - Shares some cool tips for customizing your Chrome experience.

Custom Search Engines - Covers how to change the search engines in Chrome

Customized Chrome Themes - Gives you ideas on how to change Chrome’s skin.

GreaseMetal - The Chrome equivalent to Firefox’s popular GreaseMonkey.

Whether it’s just to save time or make your browser more visually appealing, there’s an amazing amount of options for any browser that you choose to use. What are some of your favorite ways to trick out your browser? Are there any unusual things you do that others might like to try? Share your secrets in the comments area.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:30+ Skins For OperaAOL Is Really, For Real Ending Netscape NavigatorVertagio Launches Social NetworkThe Daily Poll: What Was Your First Web Browser?AllPeers Launches Firefox Bundle PackageNetscape’s Final Resting PlaceGoogle Chrome: The “GBrowser” Comes to Life

Source:Mashable!

JAJAH, a VoIP service provider that manages connections for social network users and mobile and non-mobile phones, has teamed up today with Momail, a free mobile mail operator, allowing users to make VoIP phone calls by simply sending an email.

All it takes for Momail users to implement this new option is to register with JAJAH under Momail’s “On Demand” feature page, located within a user’s member page. Once complete, you simply send an email to JAJAH with a phone number you intend to call. JAJAH will subsequently initiate a call to your handset, followed by a call to the intended party.

Momail alone is an interesting invention. Along with popular third-party webmail recognition and push mail for phones - which support the technology - Momail claims to compress data received by users by up to 99 percent its original size. For those operating on metered data plans or simply for phones that cannot consume large file sizes (or whose owners simply don’t have to patience for such transfers), this is handy indeed. Now with JAJAH’s VoIP feature on board, Momail is able to provide extra power with little or no extra investment on the user side.

Note: Momail is still in beta in some countries, including the United States. You’ll have to request a password in order to gain entry.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Jajah Launches Free Phone Calls GloballyJajah Enables VoIP Calls on iPhoneJajah Introduces Buttons: Widgets for Toll-Free CallingJajah Going Ad-SupportedeBay Deletes Listings with Jajah VoIP ButtonsJajah Expands VoIP Offerings with CallWave PartnershipJajah Chosen to Power Gizmo5 VoIP Services

The Internet radio and on-demand streaming music service Last.fm is host to over 5 million songs spanning numerous independent and big-name studios and publishers. So today’s unveiling of a partnership with LyricFind to insert some 800,000 lyrics among Last.fm’s song catalog isn’t a full sweep. Yet it includes many popular artists old and new, from The Beatles to Pearl Jam to Radiohead, enough to satisfy plenty of listeners.

The presentation of lyrics on Last.fm is similar to how you would find such material formatted in places elsewhere on the Web; center aligned and easy to read. But there are some inconsistencies to be found insofar as text spacing is concerned. (Take a look at examples #1 and #2.)

Another concern for listeners may be the position given to lyrics relative to other features. For instance, if you visit an artist’s main page on Last.fm, you’ll find biographical information, a music player, followed by recommended material as well as sections home to videos, albums, top tracks, and the comment roll. A link for lyrics isn’t evident. Neither is it visible with a specific album page in view. Users are required to drill down to an individual song page to see a lyrical preview (if it exists). One more click will bring you to the full transcript.

Despite this structural makeup, Last.fm’s deal with LyricFind -  launched for U.S.- and Canada-based listeners first, to be followed by more places “in the near future” - is worthwhile if only to give visitors an impression of a complete experience. The site has worked to do so with audio and video. Lyrics simply help to finish the picture.

For the time being, Last.fm does not display advertising beside each full lyric, but just as with real estate elsewhere in its archives, it will invite advertisers and sponsors to make themselves seen alongside text provided to users. This will involve “the ability to skin the entire page.”

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Myplaylist Launches a Lyrics ServiceJamJunky is a Community for Song WritersLearn the Words to Your Favorite Songs: 9 Sites for Music LyricsStart My Song: Community for Songwriters [The Startup Review]Last.fm versus Pandora (Continued)Last.fm Announces Major Free Music Initiative and New Business ModelIs a Better Digital Music Mouse Trap the Answer to Plunging CD Sales?