Let People Know Who You Are with About.me

A new lifestreaming site has emerged called about.me that is in the category of creating a social business card. It’s very easy to quickly setup a page that provides some basic information about yourself along with linking it to several of your social media accounts that can display recent content you created on them as well.

First thing you need to do is choose a username for your account which will then provide you with a cool url to send folks to in the form of about.me/<yourusername>. You then provide some basic information including your full name, headline, and bio that is displayed on a custom background image that you upload to the service. You can choose custom fonts and colors to use for your bio information. Lastly you can choose which of the 10 services supported you want to add to your profile. If you want to add a service that isn’t supported they allow you to import an RSS feed. Once you’re done providing this information your initial profile page is done.

After you’ve planted your profile and promoted it…just sit back for a while after some time you can return to view some stats about your visitors. They offer some basic stats that you’d come to expect from any site traffic such as pageviews, time spent on site, and unique visitors but they also offer some cool stats that are unique to their service. Their click stats provide whether a user clicked on any of the social media links and then breaks those down by which ones. They’ll also show the outbound clicks from the page to specific social media services or services you add manually. They also provide some stats info around your Twitter and Facebook activity including averages and which users you interact with the most.

When I first heard about the release of about.me I immediately thought it sounded very similar to Flavors.me (which I’ve covered quite a bit) so I wanted to test the service to determine what the differences were. I read this post over at The Next Web that seems to have determined that about.me is the clear winner of the two. I don’t feel that determination can be made so easily without providing key differences. I’ve recently been playing around with both services to determine the differences between the two. Below are some high level observations.

Flavors.me has been around for almost a year now so they’ve had quite a bit of time to mature. Setting up a your profile is very similar to about.me but you will however notice that you have quite a few more options available in many areas. For instance one of the biggest differences is that they have several different layouts for displaying your social media services whereas about.me only offers one way to do this. There are also quite a bit of differences in what content is displayed from each of the services you link up. On about.me LinkedIn only offers current position, education, and connection numbers, whereas Flavors imports enough information to provide a rich resume on the site. Flavors.me also currently offers 25 services so there’s a good chance that you may find some that you want that aren’t currently available on about.me. But when it comes to stats you don’t get any with Flavors.me unless you upgrade from the free account to their $20 per year premium version which will then give you some standard analytics and the ability to also use Google Analytics. Another feature of the premium account on Flavors.me is allowing you to host your site using any custom domain name.

So as you can see there are some key differences between these two services and I’d recommend that you try them both out to determine which one offers the better mix of features that are right for you. It’s great to see competition in this space as I feel these services fill a nice gap for people to use. Having the two of them around is only going to make this area of services become better.

Visit my about.me page here and my Flavors.me page here.