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Having a profile page on the social web makes it easier for people to find and follow what you're up to on the web.
It used to be that your friends needed to sign up for and follow you on every different web service you used. That meant not only a lot of work for your friends, but all of you were wedded to fate of the companies running the sites.
Thanks to aggregated social profiles, that's no longer true.
You can easily create your own online profile on any service you like and pull in posts from all the other sites your use. Although Facebook was one of the first to popularize this method of connecting with friends, it's by no means the only possibility.
There are a variety of places you can set up social profiles, we'll take a look at a few of the more popular possibilities.
=== Google Profiles ===
Google recently tied its Profiles features -- a place for your personal identity on the web -- to its Buzz service, which means it can pull in posts, photos, videos and messages from other web service.
To set up a Google profile just create a Google account if you don't already have one and then head to [http://www.google.com/profiles Google's profile service]. From there you can add whatever data your like -- pull in Twitter posts, Flickr or Picasa photos, Tumblr blogs and loads more.
Be sure to fill out the relevant bio information and include links to your personal site, if you have one, and a way for people to contact you.
=== Yahoo Profiles ===
Like Google, Yahoo offers a public profile page to go along with your Yahoo account. To change the settings and add more information, head to the [http://profiles.yahoo.com/ Yahoo Profiles] page where you'll find places to add links to your sites, bio information, contact data and pull in info from outside services like Twitter.
As with other services, Yahoo offers privacy settings to control who can see and search for your profile.
=== Facebook ===
While many have decried Facebook's recent move to open up to the public web, if you've been wanting to use Facebook as a public profile page the changes are good news. Now, not only can non-Facebook members see you profile, search engine spider can find it as well.
However, by default Facebook pages are totally public. To turn your Facebook account into a public profile you'll need to change a few settings. The first step is to head to your privacy settings under the account menu at the upper right corner of your Facebook page.
On the privacy page you'll see five categories of privacy settings: Profile, Contact Information, Applications and Websites, Search and Block List.
Start at the top with Profile information and change all the options to "public," this will let anyone see all the things you post. Work your way through the rest of the options, turning all the aspects you want to publish publicly to the "public" setting.
== Conclusion ==
Sharing your life with friends is easier than ever thanks to public profiles. And now that such features are no longer exclusively tied to any one company, you can move from Google to Yahoo to Facebook and back again with very little hassle.
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