I wasn’t particularly impressed with About.me’s service but apparently it was gaining a lot of steam – enough to be bought by AOL 4 days after it’s public launch (although an interview revealed they had started the discussions much earlier).
It took me a few minutes to do what I’ve done above and I’m sure if I spent more time in it I could make it a lot nicer, but I just don’t see it as good of an idea as just rolling your own one-page website, especially if you know what you’re doing.
Personal branding is an important thing to be managed well online but I’m not sure about using alternative 3rd party services is the best. Care to give me your opinion on the matter?
Tom Jamieson says
John – I have to agree. I did one with them also (http://about.me/tomjamieson) but was not impressed with the service. I am much happier with my own page (http://tomjamieson.info)
David Tonen says
When it comes to personal branding, you should control your own brand. Using a 3rd party (as you suggested above) is not a great idea because you lose some of that control. For the cost and effort, you are right – develop your own site!
Adam Hann says
I think it depends. If you don’t know how to make your own site like that on your own server, then I think it’s very helpful. If you do know how to do that, then I think it would be better to build your own.
Either way it’s simple, clean, and helps you create some sort of personal brand.
It will be interesting to see what AOL does with it.
Michael Hyatt says
Another one worth checking out is flavors.me.
John Saddington says
wow, that’s a big image of you!
Rodlie says
I don’t really see why a self-hosted page would be better? What can it offer that about.me or flavors can’t offer? You can create all the links that you want and customize each page quite a bit. In addition, I just don’t think that doing a self-hosted page is something that 99% of people out there would want to do. For the motivated techie guy, of course, going self-hosted is great, but I just don’t think there’s enough of an incentive for most people. I did my about.me page in about five minutes. Didn’t have to mess with getting a new domain, putting it on my host, uploading a personal branding theme, etc. There’s just no motivation for me to spend the extra money and effort when this seems to do what I’d like it to do just fine.