This is going to be big.
About.me is a personal profile site that is preparing to launch very soon, and they are giving you an opportunity now to claim your preferred identity. Given that the social Web is becoming increasingly personal, you should take swift action.
About.me is Your Web Identity
About.me is described as a splash page that points people to your content around the Web, allowing you to pull all this information together to build a single online identity. But it's actually much more than that.
You will also have analytics on the people who see your profile, where they are coming from, and how they interact with you on your page. In this sense, it feels like About.me could develop into a quasi representation of your Internet social graph – more importantly, what that looks like outside of the walls of Facebook.
About.me seems to be taking what Google started with Google Profiles and elevating it to what I had always imagined it could be. I was very, very excited about Google Profiles because I envisioned it becoming a powerful aggregator of our content on the social Web. But Google is always to busy creating new things, so they just let it sit there. About.me picked up the ball and is running with it.
They aren't open for business now, but they are allowing you to grab your preferred username, which is a an opportunity not to be missed, especially if you have a common name, such as Jones.
Why is This Significant?
Because ABOUT.ME + YOUR NAME = MEMORABLE. I've already snagged About.me/JeffKorhan.
Trust me, this is an opportunity to own your presence on a Web that is only going to get more complex, and that means you have to be able to manage it.
Here is the About.me profile of co-founder Tony Conrad to give you an idea of what will be possible.
And I suggest you go to About.me right now to get yours.
That includes you too Mr. Jones.
And yes, if you get the riff of my headline, I too once wanted to be Bob Dylan.
If this has been useful, leave a comment to share your thoughts, or LIKE it to share it with your friends.
Until tomorrow, Jeff
Just grabbed mine, thanks for being on the leading edge, Jeff!
Susan – You’ll be happy you did!
Jeff
Yeah, I got mine yesterday. There must be more to it than just a splash page–there are other similar services out there for that (though not as catchy as “about.me”) The analytics will be interesting.
It will also be interesting to see how it evolves. Perhaps it will display all of your published content (blog posts, tweets, etc) in one place, who knows. There’s lots of hype right now.
Chris – Yeah, I wrote the post on Friday, but per my comments on How Often Should I Blog, I didn’t want to bother folks over the weekend.
Notice it posted at 6:15 this morning. You don’t think I’m up at that hour on a Sunday do ya?
Jeff
Thanks, Jeff!
Kim – You bet. Enjoying your photos as always.
Jeff