What is it?
About.me is a simple splash-page that allows you to manage your identity and personalize your online presence. There have been many attempts at allowing you to curate your identity, claimid comes to mind. And recently Google has been recently rumored to be working on Google.me, a service most people rumor to be a social network but I predict to be an identity curation layer to their popular search engine and profiles service. This site will allow us to find relevant sites associated to us.
Why is this important?
It’s not another social network. Thank God!! As more and more social and online services come out it is necessary to organize your online identity across these services. Think of it as one level above your profile pages.
Secondly you are able to track your online presence, status, tweets and reach. This simplified analytics screen brings you your online activity in a simplified dashboard.
Problems it solves?
You generally want people to find your true identity when people search for you or when you Google (or Bing) yourself. Its refreshing to see your true online identity in a fresh, personalized and well organized way.
You are also now able to keep track of your online influence from one screen (currently this is only useful if you use twitter or Facebook).
The negatives.
About.me decided to roll out this service in a private beta (land-grab) model. This means if you didn't grab "John Smith" or "JohnSmith" early millions of other John Smiths now claim that identity. Very annoying!
Secondly, looking at some of the impressive sample pages, I am concerned that most people will not be able to create splashy profile pages. Its pretty difficult for some of us to be that artistic. I fear if About.me reaches the mainstream it may become as chaotic as MySpace was and may be prone to scammers and spammers.
About.me/noble
Monday, September 27, 2010
Identity curation at its simplest
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