On Wednesday March 2nd, 2011 Google released new public profiles for existing Google users. Besides a new URL there are a lot of new sleek differences that make Google’s User Profiles much different than they were before.
Now for those of you who are saying “Wait, Google User’s have public profiles?”, they do, only if you’ve created one already. If you created one previously your profile was located at www.google.com/profiles/{username]. Previously profiles were very simple, with some pictures and then three tabs. On the first tab you listed a name of places where you’ve lived, went to school and then worked. Aside from that you could add some contact information and then some links.
The new profiles are located in a different location, they are located at https://profiles.google.com/{username}. Notice one of the first major differences with the URL is that the new profiles are behind SSL encryption. Additionally the layout of the profiles has changed significantly, now the profile picture is larger and is separated out to the left with a center column that contains all your information and a right column that contains your links. Aside from the major display changes there is additional information on school and employment history as well as the ability to split out your home and work contact information and give different permissions to who can view them.
The big speculation is that Google is moving towards a more social profile page to further advance their social strategy, whatever that may be. As one of my friends commented, it does look a lot like the early Facebook profile pages. Now Google has a far way to go, and they have a large behemoth in front of them in the form of Facebook that I don’t think even they could overcome easily.
You can read more about Google’s new profiles straight from the horse’s mouth here.