I was reading an interesting article in Slate.com about why Google has offered users the ability to create vanity urls for their personal profile. It raised the more fundamental question of how social technologies can monetise themselves and become profitable. The article’s contention is that Google essentially want to create a stealth networking site. If you subscribe for the profile page, you must firstly have a gmail account (they can garner information about you from this), then you add in more details about yourself i.e. professsional, personal, interests, etc… you can also add in links/feeds to other sites (facebook, linkedIn, blogs, photosites. etc…. – therefore Google can access and mine this information too. So that by the end of filling in your profile, you have either wittingly or unwittingly given Google access to a lot more information about yourself so that it can then target what they call “behavioural” ads (basically ads that are relevant to you) – and thus create more clickthroughs and conversions.

The reason this is so important is that search has proven to be the most profitable of services online. Google makes vast amounts of money from its main search and content network. But the big social networking sites even though they have huge user numbers are not converting for advertisers. Users don’t want to engage with ads when updating and catching up on the likes of Facebook. But if google can collect even more information about you through this Google Profile page and the links you provide, that means that it can tailor ads specific to deep information you have provided about yourself, especially when you are surfing on google affiliate content sites – slate.com, give the example of browsing a newspaper site, and getting ads that relate to the content you are reading and your particular characteristics (whatever they ar and how they are defined) being served up to you – the thinking goes that you will be more likely to cllick through and therefore make more money for Google in doing so.

It seems like a reasonably plausible business decision. Google’s foray into social networking have not been overly successful. Orkut is big in Brazil (over 30 times the site of Facebook) and in some other countries such as India, but it has not been taken up anything like Facebook or MySpace. So rather than trying to compete with them, this could be a far more cost effectie way of mining more information from people. And was previously posted, it can do you no harm to register with Google profile (if your in the business of bineg found on Google). Also, Facebook, still don’t offer vanity urls for most people they have bgun for a few celebs) – which is annoying as your id for facebook is essentially gobbledegook if you are not a machine.

As they say, keep an eye on this, behavioural search is a hot topic, will be interesting to see it in action.

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