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Search for "me" on Google (Google Profiles now in search results) (googleblog.blogspot.com)
17 points by coglethorpe on April 21, 2009 | hide | past | favorite | 6 comments


A word of caution for those who make their profiles public. Most people simply append their gmail handle for these profiles. For example, JohnSmith@gmail.com would use the profile www.google.com/profiles/johnsmith.

It becomes incredibly easy for spammers to pull these handles from public searches, add an '@gmail.com' and spam them.


Ooops, too late. Got rushed by a blog article somewhere: "Hurry, Hurry, get your google profile handle now, or else ... someone else will take it!" So I did.

Nice lesson for all marketers - scaring users works :)


It's pretty ridiculously easy to use that spamming technique now -- just scrape usernames from public fora, and try them on the big free email hosts.

If you add a really naive email hashing scheme to your profile pages, the spammer doesn't even have to send the email to see if it's valid!: http://www.cs.brown.edu/~cce/microid/


Spammers already have your email address.


So what does this mean? Are we now in another race to gobble up good profile names for better Google results?


The photo feed doesn't work with DropBox albums. :(

Other impressions: Needs gravatar support. I like that it pulls the favicon from your links.




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