Social networks are popular, fun, and coming at us faster than we can keep up. Almost every day, I get invited to join some new (usually “in beta”) social network or micro-blogging community. I enjoy participating, really I do, but after a while, I forget what I’ve joined. To help me remember for myself, I decided to make a list for myself, and in the process I discovered that there are widgets out there designed to make this easy. Now, we can not only keep track of all our own social profiles, but we can share our profiles with the rest of the world as well. So here are 5 tools that let you create your own social profile widgets:

 
 

retaggr

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retaggr generates an interactive profile card that pops up near your photos and comments on other sites, if those sites have retaggr-enabled code. The drawback at the moment, is that there are not many retaggr-enabled sites, but the plus side is that almost any social site and/or blog (like your own blogs) can be included on the profile card. So the fact that there are practically no limits to what gets included, and that it is highly interactive makes it worth having. Only time will tell if it grows in popularity or not.

Wink Widget

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Wink calls itself a people search engine, that lets us find people profiles from across the Web, including social networks and other online communities. But the bit that matters to me is their Wink Widget, which creates a nice little embeddable list of my linked social profiles, that can be customized for color and style.

justaddme

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JustAddMe does one thing and one thing only, but it’s that exact thing that is the focus of this post. You add your profile info and it spits out the widget code to paste into your site. It’s not customizable but the clean look should work almost anywhere.

BlogCatalog NewsFeed Widget

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Although BlogCatalog is a large site that does many things, it does have an interesting social profile widget. Its NewsFeed Widget not only lets you display your social profile list, but also pulls the latest news from each of those profiles (such as your last tweet or status update). That makes it a little more interesting, since the information displayed changes over time. Available in a variety of colors.

My Social Profiles

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Bad Neighborhood’s My Social Profiles generator skips the customization bit completely, but for a very good reason. What it does is create a simple unordered list (or a table, your choice) so that you can style the code via CSS to match your site perfectly. This is the best option for anyone who is the ultimate geek and wants total control over the look and feel of everything on their site.




If you know of any other social profile widgets out there, please share in the comments. Happy Socializing!

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