Trying to control, or even manage, your online reputation is becoming increasingly difficult. And much like the fight by big labels against the illegal sharing of music, it will soon become pointless to even try. It’s time we all just give up on the small fights and become more accepting of the indiscretions of our fellow humans. Because the skeletons are coming out of the closet and onto the front porch.

We’ll look back on the good old days when your reputation was really only on the line with eBay via confirmed, actual transactions and LinkedIn, where you can simply reject anyone who leaves bad feedback on your professional life.

Today we have quick fire and semi or completely anonymous attacks on people, brands, businesses and just about everything else. And it is becoming increasingly findable on the search engines. Twitter, Yelp, Facebook, etc. are the new printing presses, and absolutely everyone, even the random wingnuts, have access.

That picture of you making out with two guys in college up on Facebook. Or perhaps doing a bong hit after winning a few Olympic gold medals. The random slam against your restaurant anonymously left by the owner of the competitor around the corner. The Twitter flame about how bad a driver you are, complete with a link to a picture of your license plate.

And it’s about to get a lot worse. Next week a startup is launching that’s effectively Yelp for people (look for our coverage in a few days). If someone has something good or bad to say about you, they’ll be able to do it anonymously and with very little potential legal or social fallout.

We’ve seen services like this in the past. Rapleaf and iKarma come to mind. But they were flawed – Rapleaf now collects and sells data about people, and iKarma seems to be little more than a realtor focused service. Another service, Gorb, has vanished completely.

But something tells me this new service, or some other one, might succeed where the others have failed. We’re primed and ready now and have lots of experience publishing all those random opinions about people and things on Twitter, Yelp and Facebook already. It’s time for a centralized, well organized place for anonymous mass defamation on the Internet. Scary? Yes. But it’s coming nonetheless.

This has been on my mind for a long while now. Our minds haven’t evolved much over the last few thousands of years, but the spread of quick fire opinions is now moving at the speed of light and forever findable on the Internet. We’re still wired to think of gossip as something that spreads quietly behind the scenes, and relatively slowly. But we’re already in a world where it’s all completely public, there are few repercussions to the person spreading it, and it is easily searchable. No wonder people freak out. We’re fish out of water.

Sure, we’ve evolved a legal infrastructure to deal with libel, slander and defamation. Those laws worked well in an era of the printing press, and sort of stretched to cover radio and television. But they are as ineffective against the Internet as copyright laws are in battling music piracy.

Other services like Reputation Defender have launched to try to help people manage their online reputations. It can be somewhat effective unless your name gets into the press, which doesn’t back away easily from the stuff they publish. It’s relatively easy to bully someone into taking down that Twitter rant, or even that Facebook photo, with an official looking email or letter threatening legal action.

But it’s much harder to get that stuff off of services that exist to publish that information. Businesses freak out over a bad Yelp review but can do little to stop it. Imagine how you’ll feel when the top result for your name is a site that includes “reviews” of you by anonymous people who know you.

Sure, lots of feedback will be positive. But piss someone off at work and you’ll have “Sketchy and unethical in the workplace” pop up about you. And it will be there forever. Heck, your great-great-grandchildren will be reading it long after you’re gone.

So What Happens Next?

We’re going to be forced to adjust as a society. I firmly believe that we will simply become much more accepting of indiscretions over time. Employers just won’t care that ridiculous drunk college pictures pop up about you when they do a HR background search on you.

Anyone who rises quickly in a corporate environment will have people complaining about you all the way up, and it will be easily findable via search. Basically, if someone doesn’t like you, even just for a moment, they’ll have the chance to hit you with an ambiguous but damaging anonymous statement. And it will be vague enough to stop any lawyer dead in her tracks from trying to get it removed, or from even learning the identity of the person who left the comment.

So what will matter? Hard proof of being a bad person. Criminal records. Non-anonymous and clear statements of wrong doing that need to be addressed. Perhaps a picture of you actually committing a violent felony. That kind of thing.

But the nonsense we’re all worried about today? I just don’t think it will carry the same weight in a few years. Because if there are pictures of the person hiring you smoking pot in college online, and there are pictures of every other candidate smoking pot in college online, it just won’t be a big deal any more.

And the kind of accusations that can kill a career today will likely be seen as a badge of honor, and a sign of an ambitious individual who has pissed off a few people along the way.

At least that’s what I hope will happen. Because there are a few pictures of me in high school and college that I’m tired of trying to keep off the Internet. Let’s just get it all out there sooner rather than later, and move on.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the quality of the prizes on offer, the competition was flooded with entries. Over 30 of them in fact, almost all of which were from people who had actually understood the entry requirements. Some had even got within a mile of being funny. Well done, them.

And so to the winners, in reverse order of funniness…

For effort alone, third prize goes to Tommy Vallier for this suggestion for LinkedIn:

Hello! My name is ____ and I’d like to join LinkedIn. My email address is ____, my website is ____, I have an RSS feed at ____ and I am on twitter as @____. I’m interested in ____, ____, ____ and expertise requests.

I am currently employed as ____ at ____ and as ____ at ____. Before that I was employed as a ____ at ____ and prior to that I did ____ for ____.

I went to school at ____ where I received a ____ in ____ and also at ____ where I received a ____.

Because I worked with ____, ____, ____ and ____ at various points in my life, I’d like to be connected to them – even though I hardly speak with them anymore. Oh, and connect me with ____, too, as they’re my current boss and I don’t want to look unprofessional.

In the last short while I’ve worked with ____ and ____, so please send them a message telling them I’ve signed up and ask them to give me recommendations for the ____ I did for them. I’d like give my own to ____ for ____.

I want to join a group devoted to ____ – because that’s what I currently do, and ____ because that’s what everyone thinks I should be doing. Have me join a ____ group too, because everyone else is doing it.

I think that’s everything about me. Please let me know when you’ve found me a new career.

Thanks.

Second prize, largely thanks to the dig at Yahoo!, goes to ‘Laura’ for her Flickr sign-up suggestion…

I feel dark inside, like this photo of a ______ with an emphasis on the shadow(s).  This is the only reason I would conceivably have a Yahoo ID, and it is __________.  Please make my password an anagram of Ansel Adams or ________.

And last, but the exact opposite of least, the winner. An entry that understood the spirit of the competition, right down to the use of punctuation as comedy timing. For that, and for masterful use of tautology, take a bow Matt Shaw. You win first prize for your proposed sign-up text for DeviantArt…

My name is __________. I feel the dark powers compel me to join this site, to post my angstily-drawn pictures of half-naked ________s and faeries, all of which are elaborate metaphors for the constant state of _________ in which I perpetually, endlessly, forever find myself. I don’t expect you to understand; no one understands. Please make my password “unicorns”.

Kudos Matt, Laura and Tommy. Assuming the email addresses you used when you commented are genuine, you’ll be genning an email from me in the next day or two to make prize arrangements.

As he both tweets and blogs about, Haggerty will be joining Twitter’s fast-growing mobile team. At LinkedIn, Haggerty did a lot more than the iPhone app, he also built the apps for the Pre and the BlackBerry. He also helped build the Buzz application that let companies scan information about them on yes, Twitter.

So what will a mobile UI guy be doing at Twitter? Well considering they just updated their previously awful mobile UI to something much nicer (on phones like the iPhone, at least), who knows. Maybe they’ll update it again. Or maybe they’ll even start dabbling in their own native mobile applications. But would they dare do that and risk alienating the many third party developers working on platforms like the iPhone? We’ll see.

Twitter has been hiring other UI people recently as well. And they continue to pull new employees left and right from some of the most well-known companies in Silicon Valley.

Update: We also hear that another LinkedIn employee is joining Twitter: Taylor Singletary, a LinkedIn evangelist and product manager will apparently be doing API evangelism at Twitter, we hear. While Singletary has confirmed that today was his last day at LinkedIn, he has yet to officially state where he’s going next — though he does tweet about birdies…

[thanks Brad]

If you’re reading this post, there’s a good chance you have multiple online profiles scattered across various services, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, and Twitter. And one problem you may face is pulling all of this information together to build a single online identity — be it for personal use, or to create a professional online profile. Flavors.me is a new site launching today that looks to make this as simple as possible, and it does so with flying colors. After a three month long private beta, the site has just launched to the public.

The service is as simple as they come. After completing a basic sign up form, you link your Flavors.me page to any of 15 online services, with options that include Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn (as well as any RSS feed). Flavors.me taps into these services via their APIs (you generally enter your credentials using OAuth or Facebook Connect), and within minutes you’re ready to start customizing your site.

All of your linked content is pulled into your Flavors.me page so it’s easy to access, but it’s never overwhelming — the site’s templates are minimalist, and hide everything but your name and a list of your online feeds/profiles at first. If you click on one of these feeds, the content will smoothly transition into view; it’s all very slick. You can also tweak your page’s color scheme, backgrounds, and layout to suit your taste (though there are only a handful of layouts to choose from initially).

You can get a feel for what’s possible by checking out my Flavors.me page, which took me all of ten minutes to set up — keep in mind that it’s entirely possible to make a page that looks better than this with a little more time.

There are plenty of other services out there that let you list all of your online presences in one place, with options including chi.mp, card.ly, UnHub, and even Google Profiles. But Flavors.me really makes the process extremely simple, and the results look great.

Flavors.me is free for its basic features, and will generate revenue through premium subscriptions, which are $20 a year. Premium features include the ability to use your own custom domain name, real time statistics, and the ability to include a contact form in your page (though obviously you could just include your Email address in the standard ‘About’ field).

Flavors.me was built by HiiDef, an incubator started by former Vimeo exec Jonathan Marcus and his brother, David Marcus.


Flavors.me from Jack Zerby on Vimeo.

Last December, mobile data swapping startup Bump opened up its iPhone API in a small, private beta. Today, they’re opening the floodgates to everyone. Developers who implement Bump’s API can use it to transfer data between two nearby phones simply by asking users to tap their devices together — a feat that’s still remarkably difficult on most smart phones.

To kickstart its API launch, Bump held a contest that invited developers to work the API into their iPhone applications. You can see a gallery of the winners here. The winning apps include CheckOut, which lets you share gift cards with friends by tapping your phones together; CloudNote, which lets you swap digital Post-It notes; and SocialFuse, which allows you to connect on Twitter and LinkedIn with someone (again, by tapping your phones together). Be sure to check out the gallery page for a half dozen runners-up to get more ideas of what the API can do.

For many startups, an API is a nice way to build a community but isn’t necessarily a key to success. I don’t think that’s the case for Bump — its API will likely prove very important. Bump wants to become the way people are swapping their contact information, data, and even money when they’re standing next to each other. Bump can integrate that functionality into their own app, but the barrier to using the service would be much lower if it was built-in to a variety of other popular applications.

CEO David Lieb says that Bump issued 300 developer keys so far. And while the current API is iPhone only, an Android version is in the works — and it’s getting “an increasing number of requests”. Bump’s official mobile application, which is available on both iPhone and Android, is now closing in on 10 million downloads.

Check out the jobs on CrunchBoard. Jobs from New York to San Francisco to Germany. See jobs in Europe here.

In the last couple of weeks we have added more than 50 jobs on CrunchBoard, including a Ruby Developer and student intern here at TechCrunch.

Here is a quick sample of some jobs posted.

uStream,
Account Manager and more – Mountain View

MyWire
Platform Architect – Redwood Shores

isocket
Web Developer – Burlingame

Linkedin
Senior Software Engineer – Mountain View

BookRenter
Ruby on Rails Developer – San Mateo

CollegeHumor
PHP Developer – New York

See the rest of the postings here!

In November 2009, when Microsoft announced the release of the public beta of Microsoft Office 2010, the company also introduced an entirely new add-on for its Outlook product that we haven’t heard a peep about since.

That’s about to change soon.

The product, dubbed Outlook Social Connector, essentially aims to make Outlook more social by integrating streams from Windows Live and third-party networks directly into the widely used communication app and its familiar interface, among other features that will enhance the functionality of Outlook and other Microsoft products like SharePoint.

For more information about how Social Connector, check our previous post and/or watch this video from Channel 9.

Microsoft and its initial launch partner, LinkedIn, didn’t share many details about the product at the time of the initial announcement but stated that it would be made available ‘early 2010′. Since then, it’s been very quiet about the product.

A public beta version of Outlook Social Connector will be available next week, sources now tell us, and we also hear Microsoft will be announcing a number of additional partners that have been brought on board alongside LinkedIn. These partners include social network juggernauts such as Facebook and MySpace, which are of course far less business-oriented than products and services like Outlook and LinkedIn.

While a lot of people will appreciate the ability to see status updates from and interact with friends from multiple social networking services straight from their Outlook application, I have a feeling their managers and their employers’ IT departments will be far less enthusiastic about Social Connector.