In the spotlights
About.me
We’ve already reviewed IdentyMe (http://identyme.com), an online service which allows you to create a virtual business card and save it under a personal URL. This is convenient when you have various accounts with, for instance, Facebook, LinkedIn etc., as all your (contact) details are stored in one central location. About.me (https://about.me) combines the simplicity of a virtual business card and the familiarity of a homepage. The principle is simple: you can reserve your name or that of your business, and from your personal page you can establish links to all your websites, blogs, profiles at various social network sites, etc. In addition, you can add your own information. About.me is free for the time being.
How do you start?
To create an account, enter your e-mail address and choose a password and personal URL (like http://about.me/yourname). Next, you can add a biography if you wish, upload a personal background and colours for your webpage and choose the fonts. The Add a Site button lets you add your own website or your social profiles. About.me currently works together with 16 social networks, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Tumblr, Blogger, YouTube and Flickr. If you click on, for instance, Facebook, you will see various options for specifying what information you wish to appear on your About.me page. So you could indicate whether you want photos, updates or your friends to be displayed. Click on the Okay, let’s do it! button and a Facebook icon will appear on your personal page. Note. We received the occasional error message when trying to add a social website to our About.me page. However, on our second attempts we were generally successful.
The advantages?
Visitors who wish to find out more about you or your business can access your social profiles on the Internet via different icons. When they click on one, a window will appear containing the most relevant information. For LinkedIn, for instance, this includes your current function, your education and experience, while Twitter shows the latest tweets. In Facebook, however, our “current status” appeared not to contain our latest post. These are probably teething problems of this relatively new website. Conveniently, you’re given an overview of how frequently your About.me page has been accessed, how often visitors have clicked through to your profiles and how often your page was linked to. All this information is summarised in the Dashboard, which also includes tools for promoting your About.me page, for instance via an e-mail signature, via the Twitter and Facebook social networks, or via the Google, Yahoo! and Bing search engines.
Flavors.me: an alternative
You could also give Flavors.me (http://flavors.me) a try. It does the same kind of thing as About.me, but it allows you to add more than 30 different social profiles (via Content). In the free version, this number is limited to four (for $20 or £12/year you can remove this limit). The Design section provides various options for customising the website layout, background, colours and fonts. Like About.me, Flavors.me also offers various Promote options, but for detailed statistics about your visitors you will have to take out a paid subscription.
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