Your web persona

We all have googled our name one time or the other---trying to find our online footprint or just for the kicks. The Personas project from MIT Media Labs goes one step further by assimilating information about you on the web and defining your 'web character' [Click the image for a clearer version]. It provides another dimension to the people search space although it may be a work in progress still (medical,illegal-me???).

Google is of course synonymous with search but specialized search engines focusing on singular verticals are slowly slicing my search time. For instance, I now use Pipl for people search and Tinyeye for reverse image search. Both are pretty good at what they claim to do. For example, Pipl searches the web for a given name and tabulates all information it can find about that person---personal websites, blog entries, social networking profiles--in a profile page like layout. Similarly, Tinyeye is trying to solve one of the long standing problems in computer vision---image matching. You upload an image and tinyeye tries to find images 'similar' to the uploaded image by identifying the objects in the image. It is great to see startups trying to carve their presence in a space already saturated by many big shots.