Hidden In Google Profiles: More Social Network Connections On The Way?

Is Google readying several new “connect an account” options in Google Profiles?

Today, if you visit the connected accounts settings for your profile, Google offers a dropdown with six options: Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, Quora, Twitter and Yelp. But, as James Slater pointed out today, there are several additional social account options that appear to be hidden in Google’s system.

Slater noticed that each of the existing options is associated with an ID number, but those IDs range from 3 (Twitter) to 18 (Flickr) with several numbers not being used. MySpace is associated with ID=2, for example; Foursquare is ID=10 and Digg is associated with ID=11. Others Slater discovered include Hi5, Microsoft, AOL, Plaxo, Wretch and GitHub.

None of the IDs currently work for connecting those account types, so it may be something that Google’s still working on. Still, Slater wrote a Greasemonkey/Greasemetal script for Firefox/Chrome users that makes the hidden accounts visible. See his blog post for more on that.

But is any of this necessary?

Even though Google officially lets users connect only six accounts to a profile, you can still add other social profile links (or website links) via the “custom link” tool on the Edit Profile page. As you can see below, I’ve added links to my YouTube, Last.fm and Google Reader profiles this way — along with several other websites I’m involved in.

What’s unclear to me is the difference between connecting a social profile via the “Connect an Account” dropdown and adding a link via the “custom links” tool. Google’s profiles help doesn’t offer much explanation of that.