Chelsea - Stamford Bridge

Chelsea - Stamford Bridge

Tuesday, April 15, 2014

What is it about About.me?

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  






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