Apparently I’m more prophetic than I thought. Someone just pointed out to me this is actually what I wrote back in January:

I would not at all be surprised to see these user profiles (which have an icon place holder that is the exact same as the Google Talk icon placeholder and now Gmails contact list icon placeholder) consolidated as one giant Google user profile for each user that is used for every Google Service they use…including Google Reader…

To me something like a unified profile is more useful then most of the aspects of OpenSocial because I simply use so many Google services for day-to-day things. If there was a profile page with something like an activity stream – as Mathew Ingram is suggesting – that would be useful to me.

Google has of course been tying all their products together one piece at a time for a while now (email via Gmail within Google Reader, Google Talk in Gmail, etc…), but for the entire first 3 quarters of the year I noted over and over again how badly they were missing some of the social opportunities with these products. Good to see they are finally starting to pick up the ball.