On Friday, Nick Gonzalez wrote about a web service that was due to launch and demo later that evening at the TechCrunch party. The service is question is Profile Builder, with which “you can create one profile to link together all of your bits of online identity onto one customizable profile.”
Being interested in this online identity stuff, I headed over to the site to try it out. I was told to try later, and assumed that the party hadn’t started in California yet.
It’s now Saturday. At my first visit back to the site, it was rather broken. It was confused about whether I already had a profile and, when I asked for help, it gave me Lorem Ipsum. More recently today, it allowed me to create a username, and told me I could actually start on the profile proper tomorrow.
I don’t think I’ll be back tomorrow. First impressions have not been good, as you have just read. It is important, to me at least, to add that I’ve seen no mention of OpenID being implemented in Profile Builder. I already have an OpenID with a profile of sorts.
Any service that wants to help me manage my online identity hurts its case if it makes me create yet another userid/password combo. I have an OpenID, and I’d like to be able to use it. In other words, the chances of me giving Profile Builder another try will be a lot higher if it’s an OpenID consumer; but I get the impression that it isn’t.