Okay Geek Farm
Our First Look at About.me - Simple, clean and surprisingly useful
Jason Tsay
We first heard about the site, About.me, about a month ago and I have to say, we were pretty darn excited about the concept - a single page that would contain all of your basic online information and display it in a relatively artistic manner. So we signed ourselves up for the list and voila! we got accepted into the superspecialawesome alpha preview! Read on for our experiences.
As we said in the introduction, About.me is all about simplicity. To set up your account, just type in some basic information (name, email, etc) and then type in a quick biography of one or two sentences. From there, you can choose to upload your own photo or one of theirs as your background and select from a couple of social networking services (Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and Tumblr just to name a few) to use as buttons on your page. A couple of quirky fonts are there for your choosing and you can drag the information box just about anywhere on the page.
Everything is pretty darn simple on the website and you end up with a clean and elegant looking profile page. You can style it pretty much however you want. Everyone will end up with wildly different results (For example, Brandon and Jason’s pages look totally different yet they both have that iconic “About.me” feel to them.)
There is also a statistics part of the site where you can monitor views on your About.me profile, links to your profile, and even statistics about the social networks you’ve linked up.
Now it’s time for Brandon to give you his thoughts
Ok, here we have yet another little web startup that relies on fancy designs and cute concepts, but something that makes About.me stand out is that it gives people something very important — an online presence. When you think about it, not many people have a website or blog where people can find information about them, and contact them easily.
Sure there’s Twitter and Facebook, but in the professional world these services are (sadly) irrelevant. What About.me does is it allows people who don’t know how to create a website, or buy a domain, or any of that stuff and gives them a super easy way to create an online presence.
Overall, the service is solid, and the customization options are very well thought out (Twitter like) and minimal to keep confusion out of the picture. I would recommend this service to people who need a place to send others who want to learn about them, or find them elsewhere on the web. Jason pretty much covered the backend of things (stats, customization), so I will leave you with his final thoughts.
Now, Jason’s final thoughts
Overall, we think this is a really great idea with lots of potential and can’t wait to see where the company will take this concept. As for now, only a limited lot of people are getting accepted into the preview so put your name on the list at about.me!
