• Print this
• Republish
• Get e-mail alerts
• RSS

A common complaint about the Internet is that the typical user has to maintain multiple personal profiles on multiple sites, ranging from Facebook to Last FM. Enter mEgo, a personalized portable profile that travels online with you across social networks. The mEgo.com body-shaped widget, which resembles a high-tech baseball card on your screen, stores all your profile information and is interactive.

Click on the avatar’s hand, for example, to access an Amazon wish list. Mouse over the heart to learn essential details about someone. Peer into the eyes to access a Netflix queue or YouTube favorites. It’s also possible to leave messages for the person – on their animated person. (Users can opt for a photo instead of an avatar.)

Currently growing at 2,000 new adopters each day, mEgo hopes to use personal data for targeted advertising – with a do-gooder twist. “If somebody has a widget that gets thousands and thousands of widget views and we’re advertising on that widget, that person is going to be generating X dollars for us,” says Julia Johnson, one of the company’s founders.

“So, of that X dollars, we will give a portion of those dollars to a nonprofit. [We want] to allow users to determine which not-for-profit they want their portion of revenues to go toward.”

( More stories )