Great idea Ton - I'd buy one of those.

Also see Euans posting on this

What a tangled web we weave :)

It sounds like you want a combination of

- easy group forming, so you can clump related people you met at the same time together
- something visual, so that you can pick people out by faces and not just by names
- something interconnected to the nth degree so that you can pull out tendrils from people's increasingly spread out web presences

The one tool you didn't mention that might actually help in some of this is Facebook - if you were in a world where enough people were using it - where it's easy to create a group and to mark up photos with links to people in the group. Natually it helps to have critical mass there already, of course, so it won't be useful for everything.

Edward, I hadn't yet time to test Facebook, but as far as I understand it you have to host everything there. What if I created all my online data before on different services (e.g. photos on flickr, contacts on xing, rss on bloglines, videos on youtube...)? It would require a big step to move all that content to another host/service and it doesn't make any sense to me.

Maybe the openID project goes in the right direction: http://openid.net/

Kind regards,
Walter

Have you looked at the Internet Address Book:
http://internetaddressbook.com

Even if somebody hasn't opted into their service, it will search various networks and return results. They've been enhancing features over the past few weeks, and I'm hoping that they expand the search to include more results.

Here's a search for Ton:
http://internetaddressbook.com/result.php?firstname=Ton&lastname=Zijlstra&city=&x=74&y=19

I've been banging on about this for a while now. I don't want a great "MyPortal" page. I want a great "AboutMe 2.0" page that is indexed by Google. It should have links to everything I belong to and ideally links to everything I post on the net, anywhere. opinity.com are going in this direction.

Marc Canter also adds his thoughts

The different suggestions on what tools to use for this, mostly point to another 'central' spot where one can create a profile etc. I don't think this is the way to go. I merely need something to aid my searches. I have a LinkedIn account so I can search there. I need my searchtool to be able to use my own account info to search for me.
The mentioned internetaddressbook looks like what I had in mind, but then something that lives in my browser toolbar.

Trying out the internetaddressbook it misses my LinkedIn account. It does find my 2 ICQ accounts (my old lost one, and my new one), but then cannot display them.

Hi Ton,
what I most like about your thoughts is the fact that you still prefer to do the registration manually and that you want to decide for yourself what to add to your feedreader. The "search support" sounds nice. In our iCamp project (http://www.icamp.eu) a small group is actually now looking into how to improve Flock - the social webbrowser (http://www.flock.com).
I am not sure about what the next version will include in terms of features, but I have heard that it will be more "person-oriented" (whatever that means).
My problems with following up on people I meet, by the way, is still more basic ;-). Too often I get carried away by looking at interesting links that I find during my search and time is tjust flying by.

Ton, I just ran into ClaimID - a sort of personal index page you can build that has a bunch of links to all of your profiles and services etc.

It appeared to be about an hour's work to get something I was happy with, and I didn't have the hour at the time I saw it, so I let it pass.

I'm not sure that we can expect the online world's unveiling of a persona to be any less complex than the in-person world. So many people have a story that's longer than fits on a page and pretending that the digital makes it otherwise is asking too much.