About.me recently announced it raised another $11 million in funds to become the platform of choice in creating a personal home page. The fundraising brings the total to more than $17 million and it led me to dust off my old about.me page.
The personal home page scene is diverse
Call me old school, but I still think that if you want a personal home page, the best route is a good old fashioned website and blog, along with a custom domain. If you can get first name last name.com, you’re golden. I’ve used my site for building my personal brand, my consulting business and sharing my business experiences and some of my DNA from my favorite things like exploring the land of 10,000 lakes on thoughts on some of the latest books I’ve read. I’ve landed new clients, speaking opportunities and new full-time gigs from this site. But for those who don’t want the hassle of maintaining a website, solutions like about.me work just fine. So what all is out there? The scene is quite diverse.
About.me
About.me has updated some features to make the page more useful.Particularly, the ability to create collections, think (circles to Google+ or Lists to Twitter) of other About.me pages. It increases site engagement and creates an About.me network of sorts. The biggest challenge for About.me is to continually increase ease of use, reducing the number of “options’ but still maintaining a degree of flexibility for those who want to customize their little corner of the internet machine. Supports google analytics.
Flavors.me
Flavors.me (ryanruud.flavors.me) is similar to About.me in that it offers one page central location that brings together links of all your social networking sites. While it doesn’t have the same network feature as About.me’s collections, it does boast some unique abilities to pull in the feeds of various social networks offering a unique solution for those who want to leverage a custom domain. (example) Supports Google Analytics.
Rebel Mouse
Finally, there’s rebel mouse. The simplest of all digital hubs, an aggregate of everything you share online. While the other solutions offer some customization and ability to serve as a personal website, rebel mouse offers something for the minimalists among use. Simple connect the social networks you want to publish to the feed and voila, you have your site.
Final thoughts on personal home pages
There is certainly something to a central place online for all of our digital post-it notes. But as you can tell, having a space on all of them can be a bit overwhelming. I’ve set up profiles on them all mostly as they’ve launched just to get to know what they offer. I still prefer my WordPress site, althought I’m curious to see what the new influx of cash does to the development at About.Me.
What say you?
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