ShowYourself – a Distributed Something or Other

ShowYourself is a very simple tool that lets you display a list of your profile urls in a customizable widget.

When I say simple, I’m not exaggerating.  There’s no registration required, there seems to be only one page on the whole site, there are no ShowYourself profiles, and the process is as simple as going down a checklist of social media sites and plugging in your various user ID’s.

This service is 100% distributed.  Once you’ve set up your widget, there’s no reason to ever go back to ShowYourself, unless you want to add / delete profiles.  I can’t call it a distributed social network, because there’s nothing networked or social about it.  It doesn’t capture relationships among users, and doesn’t offer any social media tools like comments or messaging.

It’s a handy little tool, but in no way is ShowYourself a threat to services like Wink.  Without a home base, there are no monetization prospects, and there’s really not much to it beyond a formatted list of URLs.  If anything, this looks like a cool little side project of high school student Dustin Bachrach.

That being said, I think a tool like this would be a welcome feature as part of an existing social network.  I’d love to have something as simple as this available to me when setting up a profile on a social media site.

For more on ShowYourself, see WidgetsLab, StickiWidgets, and Mashable.

Comments

[Ming]

Posted about this a couple of days ago too...

http://stickiwidgets.com/2007/03/13/showyourself-revealed/

This is basically a HTML generator and that's about it. You plug-in your details and it spits out HTML/CSS. Anyone can do this themselves with just a little HTML/CSS knowledge.

It's good for people who don't know HTML, but that's about it.

On the other hand, in regards to Wink, not everyone wants to deal with managing yet another account or SEO issues.

ShowYourself and Wink have completely different goals and audiences.

[lawrence]

Whoops, I don't know how I missed your post Ming - I just added it as a reference.

[Ming]

Thanks for the mention.

[darren]

doh! that list would have come in handy a couple of weeks ago when I was trying to look you up in san francisco when I was there.

[lawrence]

Darren, your feed seems to be broken.