After the experience
with the first blog post (not an exercise related one), I have decided to write
a second one and this time the trigger to the topic was another classmate’s
post, Kimberly Fenton’s. As you might understand from the heading I’m writing
about the About.me social network. I will be honest in saying that I have never
even heard of it before I have been introduced in this module, #UOSM2008, and
to be honest the first impression wasn't good. It has lots of similarities with
other social networks, such as:
- Similar to LinkedIn it sends everyday notifications of the people that have viewed your about.me page.
- People can send each other notifications stating that they have “complimented” you and it is very similar to dating websites’ “Wink” button.
- It also does provide a news feed and sends you a weekly updates and news.
- Etc.
However, a question
may arise in our heads, whether what does it differ About.me from others? What
is special about it? There is one feature: it allows a user to connect all social
networks related to a person, in one place. And I will be honest, this is quite
an awesome idea (sorry my informal language). At times when we feel lost among
this amount of social networks, at times when we even forget the usernames and
passwords for every single one, and when we are struggling to keep the data
up-to-date on all of them at the same time, this solution is just brilliant.
However, for me personally, not the idea itself gives the interest in this
social media, but the simplicity of presentation standing behind it. As you can
see from the picture below, there are just a few lines of text summarizing
yourself, basic contact information and self-explanatory icons that refer you to
respective social network websites. Isn’t that simple?
And last but
not least I want to mention one special icon that not everyone might be
familiar with. It is the very last one in my list of social networks and I was
quite surprised to see it there. It is the GitHub, and for those who don’t know
it is a web-based hosting service for software development projects that uses
the Git revision control system (https://github.com/).
Basically, it is like a Dropbox, but for coding, and for me as an IT person it
is everything. Just imagine that I can make my code public and share with
anyone and everywhere.
After the
actual creation of the About me page, a mutual feedback was given by two of our
classmates, Kimberly Fenton and Francesca Gerard. Below you can see our
conversion via Twitter:
Based on
their feedback, following changes were implemented:The amount
of text summarising my personality was reduced, in order to not to make it
boring.
- Telephone number as a contact details was removed, because of privacy concerns.
- Words, such as “major” or “furthermore” were paraphrased to look more modern.
- The font style for the heading (name and surname) was made a bit simpler and the content was proofread.
- And finally, the background image was changed.
To view all
the changes applied and the profile itself, please follow the link: http://about.me/eldar.alasgarov
