The new Google Profiles and marketing professional services

I subscribe to Duct Tape Marketing's newsletter and the last issue presented the new Google Profiles offering. At first glance, this seemed to be a great way for independent professionals to promote themselves and their services. The promise of a page 1 appearance is indeed enticing.

Like many, I strive to strike a balance between enhancing my professional visibility on the Web and protecting my privacy. Any Web marketing opportunity must support the professional image I wish to convey to a target audience (Facebook, mybloglog, and such do not) and let me fully control - now and in the future - what information is public and how it is presented.

Google Profiles was tempting. But several articles from both the mainstream press and techie journals cooled my enthusiasm. Take a glance at TIME Magazine's "Why Google Wants you to Google Yourself" and Wired's "Google Wants You to Profile Yourself".

As Wired's Ryan Singel put it:

But someday, when Google needs more ad revenues, the walls within Google will fall.

Its spiders follow the links you gave it — it will classify your Flickr photos, root around in your blog posts and Twitter feeds, check out your friends and then it will be able to build a very complex profile of you in order to sell you to advertisers.

That spider will start with your Google profile, which you could not help but making.

Thanks, Google, but I think I'll pass.

What about you?