About.me: A Social Networking Profile to Rule Them All?
Do we now have so many profiles online that we need another site to keep track of them all? The founders of a new platform called About.me are betting on it.
About.me ties together users’ other social-networking sites and includes analytics that let users track things like how many people viewed their About.me page and which social-networking profiles they viewed from there.
In other words, it allows people to market themselves with a photo and links to their other online “selves.” Other social-networking sites point to just one aspect of a person, but the About.me home splash page “satisfies some kind of void” to give people a more rounded online brand, said About.me co-founder Tony Conrad. The pages, which are more ad-like than profile-like, can have links to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, email, Foursquare and personal blogs.
About.me is also based on Mr. Conrad’s hypothesis that “people have a borderline obsession with looking at data of themselves,” he says. “It’s like holding a mirror up to yourself and saying, ‘Oh, that’s what my digital online life looks like.’”
