about.me pages

I've been meaning to blog about this (and a lot of other things besides) for a while. If you've not yet got an about.me page I think you should. My first reaction when I saw it was "why would I need one of those?", but having used it for a while I think it's really useful. I've had mine for about a year now and I started putting it on my work signature about 6 months ago. I used to put my blog URL on my signature but since I've been blogging less that was looking a little redundant. I know colleagues that put their twitter address (bit risky) or their LinkedIn address (bit boring) on their signatures, but about.me seems like a good alternative. You can create a good looking page very easily (not that mine's great yet) pulling together all your social networks into one place. You can see mine here, and if I wasn't using a dynamic views template on Blogger I could embed it in this post or on a page or in the layout. There's a really good iPhone app too (hurry up with the Android one!).

I really like the way you can pull in loads of different pages into one space and get a really neat preview on the page (although does anyone else find that the Twitter and Blogger previews aren't quite up to date?). I've not added my Facebook page because it says "Adding Facebook will allow visitors to your about.me page to see all of your recent friends, photos, and status updates, even if they have limited access on Facebook". Which I don't want, but I have added Twitter, Blogger, Instagram, LinkedIn and Google+ (although you do need to be a bit careful about bringing everything together in one place).

I was reminded about all this yesterday when I (along with every other user on the planet) got an email update about them going independant again (AOL bought them out a few years ago) In the email they describe their commitment to be "the best personal identity service on the web", which they may well be.

Stuart Johnson
Deputy Director
Career Development Service
University of Leicester
www.le.ac.uk/careers
http://about.me/stujohnson