Google introduced a new feature available in your Google Dashboard called Me on the Web. It's officially announced purpose is to "help understand and manage what people see when they search for you on Google."
Google suggests this tool will help make it easier to monitor your identity on the Web and consider this a next step in providing options to protect your identity.
Offering assistance for setting up search alerts, managing your online identity and helping you remove unwanted content, this service sounds altruistic enough. With the recommendation Google recently gave suggesting web content authors use rel=author and rel=me attributes, this announcement seems like a natural follow-up idea. However, the new Dashboard section is merely links to how-to's help articles and different interface to Google Alerts, which are not new.
The second step to managing your identity, according to Google's help topic, is to create a Google profile. In fact, if you don't have a Google profile, you can't use "Me on the Web," because it reports information you entered on your Google profile.
From Facebook-like profiles to their +1 button, it's no secret that Google has ambitions of being more social. Getting a profile is the first step. And Google is trying every reason to get people to sign up for one.
What's your take? Do you have a profile? Is this useful? Is it altruistic or merely a ruse by Google to get more profile signups? Let us know in the comments below.
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