About a month ago Roberto Bonanzinga pinged me with details of The Internet Address Book (IAB), an identity search engine that scanned a host of popular social networks – MySpace, LinkedIn, Delicious, Skype etc. – to find a person’s various identities and/or profiles. Although this feature alone was potentially useful it was rather singular. At the time, it seemed like just another website where I had to invest a lot of time to register my social network identites, instant messaging IDs and web addresses but in return got very little value back.
Well since then the IAB have released a number of new features and functions which certainly make the site more useful and worth investing a little more time in. The new tools page provides tools like a search snippet which you can place on your personal blog, profile, email or website.
They have also developed a search plug-in for Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox users (mozilla browsers) as well as a Widget for Apple Computer users. They have also added some more internet addresses to The Internet Address Book. e.g Profileheaven.co.uk, Ryze.com, Technorati, Picturetrail, Buzznet and many more. To see the entire list go to The Internet Address Book.
Another new tool that is interesting is the Wanted Snippet where you can list people you’re looking for by placing it on your blog or profile. They’ve also made it really easy to invite all your contacts from Live Messenger or Outlook at once!
They’re also added in a flash based PIDY – personal identity – widget which you configure and then add to your website, profile or blog. Below is an example of my PIDY.
With the growing number of social networks, IM clients and websites accounts we all have, bringing it all together is definitely a growing trend. Other sites doing a similar thing include the PeopleAggregator, simply because traditional whitepages, yellowpages or mainstream search engine sites don’t seem to do a very good job of finding our web identities.
I can imagine this service either being bought up by Yahoo and integrated into their own set of vertical people search services or being replicated by Google and Microsoft.