Amid all the rumours about Google buying Twitter, it appears the search giant has been quietly refining its own social-networking arsenal. The company’s “official” social network, Orkut, has been largely ignored to death. However, the company has another trick up its sleeve – Google Profiles.  

This is essentially a stripped-down Facebook-style profile page, which allows you to share photos (from Flickr or Picasa), videos (YouTube), web links (to your Facebook and Twitter profiles, for example) and the usual biographical gubbins. However, perhaps its most useful feature – which was only added last week – is the option to create vanity URLs. This means that, unlike Facebook, you can create a profile with a memorable web address, such as http://www.google.com/profiles/barrycollins.

However, there’s one sizeable fly in the ointment. If you sign in with your Google account, your Gmail username is automatically selected as your vanity URL. That means anyone who searches for your name – including spammers – will instantly have your Gmail address.  The only other option is to choose what looks like a randomly generated string of numbers (i.e. http://www.google.com/profiles/10279475784) as your URL, which completely defeats the object of vanity URLs. 

If you don’t have a Gmail account, however, you’re free to choose whichever URL you like. So Google is effectively punishing Gmail users, by practically forcing them to use a URL that gives away their email address. 

It’s turned what could have been a pretty useful feature into something that I won’t be touching with a barge pole. Let’s hope Google sees sense, and gives its loyal Gmail users the chance to mask their email addresses with something a little friendlier than a string of digits.