Several weeks ago, I was let onto a site called about.me. Aparently some industrious folks obtained that domain and decided to do something ridiculously simple that works.
Just a look through their gallery of current users give a great indication of a first impression page you could easily put on your email signature or business card to easily connect your colleagues with everything you do. Yesterday, I finally received my invitation after maybe a month or two of waiting. You can reserve your name (mine is about.me/mikesorg, btw) now and have it handy when they are ready to open up to more people. It’s a mad rush to be the first to get your name. I know Veronica Belmont is pretty good at being THE Veronica on services, and was one of the first stand outs of what a nice picture* and some text could do on here. Some people with more unusual ethnic names may have a good chance right now, but several million strong “Michaels” have a harder time.
The interesting thing is, just as I was climbing on board the about.me bandwagon, another player jumped on my radar in the form of Flavors.me thanks to yesterday’s episode of Net@Night. While the domain doesn’t seem as effective as about.me’s I think there’s still something here. This site offers a quick and easy way to build almost the same thing as the former service, as proven by my quick build that looks almost like the above page. Both offer some great ways to integrate your social media sites. Flavors.me seems to have far more ability to integrate services like Gowalla and ever expanding options. The major difference is a little more robustness in creating more of a web site than just a simple splash page, but most of those robust features come along with a $20 a year fee, which definitely doesn’t hurt the pocketbook by any means.
Websites are getting easier and easier. Part of the reason I feel my Photoshop skills slipping day by day as I relie more on WordPress, Squarespace, and Blogger accounts to create pages to get things done. This just made it that much simpler for everyone. It’s to the extent that I’m considering abandoning my long overdue for an overhaul mikesorg.com portfolio page to just point to the about.met/mikesorg. Or perhaps to replace all of the .coms and Twitter in my email signature with this url instead, since it can prove as an access point for anyone to touch base with me using the service most comfortable to them.
Either way, I think it’s a good idea for anyone looking to put themselves out there and be discoverable to jump on these sorts of services, if found. For me, I’m on a personal mission to become the Alpha Michael Sorg on Google, and this could be another tool in redundancy to that effect.
*A big thanks to Mulango for helping me hash out a photo concept for this page and aiding with his better equipped iphone 4 for taking the pics.