Flowtown is a service I recently came across that offers to “turn an email address into a social profile”. They’ve got a little sample version you can try out here to see what it pulls up using your own email address, but it doesn’t really do the service justice. Here’s what a full profile looks like:

That’s what it got using my personal Gmail account. Amazon Wishlist, Flickr, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pandora are all links to the public profile pages of those accounts. When I went to screenshot this I thought about blurring out my potentially embarrassing Amazon Wishlist (I don’t even recall what’s on there) or personal Twitter account (not updated since July). But none of that—none of anything Flowtown collects and presents—is private. Most of it is out there and anyone with some time could sit down with Google and find most of it (and more). At the very least, as long as this person has my email address, they can just sign up for Flowtown themselves.

But there is a lot more to Flowtown than highlighting the need for personal reputation management. It has serious business applications. If a company has a mailing list of tens of thousands of customers they can pull all of those customers’ Twitter accounts and start following them and sending them coupons. Those messages are probably more likely to be seen than mass email that gets caught in a spam filter.

There are also more interesting opportunities, like pulling all those Tweets and looking for common topics to find out what a company’s audience is (on balance) into these days. That information could also be used to target particular Tweets at particular users based on demonstrated interest. The music for a commercial could be decided based on information scraped from Pandora about what most customers are listening to through that service. There are lots of ways to extract useful information from what was just a lit of email addresses.

Those sorts of things are all possible because data can be bulk imported and exported. But that only facilitates the more novel examples above—there’d be plenty more work to do. Flowtown’s power is in its automation, not some sort of magical social Web x-ray vision that allows it to see things about people that others never could. Still, it sort of seems like it’s an invasion of privacy, or like it should be one.

I think that’s because privacy and social media have an odd relationship. While people are still concerned about invasions of privacy in their online lives, the entire social Web as we know it owes its existence in no small part to the fact that people care a lot less about privacy than they used to.

Sites like Facebook and LinkedIn are networks of real people—accounts ideally correspond with and describe individuals out there in the “real world”. People even use their real names and upload real photographs of themselves and tell other people (roughly) where they really live!

By 1996’s standards, this would all be very unnerving. Back in the glory days of America Online, people used screen names selected deliberately to mask their identity. It would be dangerous to do otherwise, the thinking went. And plenty of people would advise against using that new “www.amazon.com” because only a fool would give out their credit card information on the Internet.

Neither Facebook nor LinkedIn nor many of the other sites Flowtown pulls from would make any sense in a world where there wasn’t a one-to-one correspondence between individuals and online identities. That’s not the case across the board of course. One can Twitter or Tumbl anonymously just fine, or even maintain personal accounts and anonymous ones on the same network.

But those anonymous identities would still be connected to an email address. In fact, you could create a whole fictional person around a free email account that Flowtown would generate a social profile for as elaborately as it would anyone else.

To that point, while it’s not exactly the same as making up a new person, but here’s what Flowtown gives me when put in my SnapDragon email address (rather than my personal Gmail):

So it’s not really my social profile (or anyone else’s), it’s the social profile of that email address. That puts an interesting spin on the data one could extract from Flowtown. For instance, I ran my email address book through the system’s free account and here’s the aggregate data about social network usage that was returned:

Now, some of the email address I put in are people’s work ones and some are personal ones (for several people I have both). As is clear from the example of me, not all email addresses are equally representative of the people they correspond to in terms of how they connect up to the social Web. So how accurate is that chart? And how helpful is it if it only covers certain services—I’m sure Delicious is more widely used than StumbleUpon, but it’s not included in the reports one way way or another.

Well, that’s why profiling one’s contacts isn’t the best (or at all intended) use of Flowtown. As their impressively close two-way integration with MailChimp suggests, the idea is to leverage lists of email addresses generated for email marketing in order to do targeted social media marketing. The issue there isn’t an invasion of privacy but rather the potential for spam across new platforms, not less privacy just more noise.

But one way or another the noise will get filtered out. If a platform can’t provide that capability it will suffer in terms of users anyway. So the challenge will really be to use tools like Flowtown to craft sufficiently targeted outreach campaigns that they stop being noise and become valued communication. Having the ability to efficiently translate an email address (one tiny bit of information) into a social profile (a bigger piece of information) should certainly make that an easier task.