Well, it's nice to see that now Google is interested in helping me divulge personal information about myself for the greedy consumption of identity thieves those around me. Thus, it too has joined the ranks of Facebook, LinkedIn, Myspace, Yahoo, yelp, ning, any number of other idiotic sites.
i know why so many sites are so all-fired interested in getting me to spend time divulging the darker secrets of my past, (invest more time on a site and you spend more time there/ better targeted ads/ more interesting trend metrics they can resell to marketing companies/etc.), but i just can't help dorking with them.
Look, as i've noted in the past, it's up to you if you want to make the life easier for someone interested in breaking into your mail account, but i'd prefer really doing that. Heck, i'm the guy that told you to keep a fake profile. Still, the ever enticing allure of just screwing with their demographics is simply beyond the limits of my will power. i'm perfectly capable of establishing relationships outside of randomly emailing individuals that also liked "Eegah!" so that i can be their friend and we can while away the nights talking about Valerie. Needless to say, i'm also not really the sort of person who wants someone like that sending me a random email either.
No, if anything, my goal is to use these pretty much as they don't want me to. i use them to add links back here so that should someone search on my name they wind up here. That's called personal SEO.
Ok, granted, i'm pointing them to my blog which is loaded with idiotic rants, but hey, it's a common target.
Mind you, nothing's stopping you from doing the same thing. In fact, i'd encourage it. Stake out a bit of virtual realty you can call your own and mount a campaign to make your name well known. i'll toss in that a good friend of mine mounted such a campaign a year or so ago and managed to get his blog noted fairly high for "Matthew Shepherd", even against a topic with quite some notoriety.
Heck, even if your main personal space is a facebook page (seriously?), no reason a'tall why you can't point the vast majority of folks there and build up a bit of your own personal net-cred.
Plus lying on profiles is a gas.
