I have online profiles on LinkedIn, Blogger, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and on this blog, and a few other places...and now, I'm taking part in the early beta test of About.me, which I've described here before when I warned you to sign up to save your name. Moving early means you can find my test profile at about.me/denisegraveline even now.You'll find a lot to like in About.me, including the option to add links to your blogs, websites and social network profiles and RSS feeds, from Flickr, Blogger and WordPress to anything on which you have a feed. With Facebook, you can choose to import your profile or a direct link to one or more Facebook pages--in my case, I chose to link to the don't get caught page and The Eloquent Woman page on Facebook, but not my profile. That level of granularity in connection is a welcome feature, along with the dashboard, unusual in social-network profiles. It will, over time, give you statistics on page views of your profile--a great option for entrepreneurs, job-hunters and others.
Are you trying About.me? Share your impressions in the comments. (Nope, not a sponsored post...just me putting my toe in another puddle of social media.)
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2 comments:
Denise,
Thanks to your early warning about About.me I signed up to save my name, and now I'm in their early beta (I think they're actually calling it an alpha) too. My profile, such as it is, is at about.me/bobfinn
I'm having a hard time figuring out what will make about.me useful. The profile is only a single page. Sure you can add links to your other pages, but I have those same links on my personal web page. The analytics might be nice if people start landing on the about.me page, but I'm not at all sure they will.
Am I wrong, or will About.me only become useful when (if) it becomes a ubiquitous tool that everyone uses?
Thanks, Bob--Glad to know we are both on the new site.
I think this idea has more going for it than just the crowd, although it's true that these new services get more interesting once more people arrive at them.
I think folks need online profiles in a variety of places simply because you can't guarantee that everyone will go to your website. So, as with any other social media project, you need to figure out where your hoped-for audience might be and put your information in front of them, here, there and everwhere.
What I often find frustrating is that most online profiles limit your ability to collect a lot of online links--LinkedIn and Facebook do this by limiting the number of links. Twitter and FriendFeed use very short profiles. Google profiles are a nice exception if you take the time to fill them out--I even have links to important blog posts, as well as my full blog, there. If your business has several Facebook pages and numerous profiles elsewhere, this kind of "spalash page" site is useful.
So I think About.me works well.The attractiveness and the stats won't hurt either. But for people who don't have a website, or want to show their full range of social and online activity, this is a useful tool. (I say this having already found some bugs.)
As with anything else, of course, you will have to start linking to it elsewhere so people can find it...
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