If you’re anything like Betabeat and routinely find yourself chasing down founders and venture capitalists (it’s all very professional, we assure you), chances are you’ve come across more and more About.me profiles recently.
The San Francisco start-up, which AOL (AOL) snatched up last December, lets users create a free splash page-like personal profile with a big photo, short bio, and handy little buttons connecting to your other profiles scattered around the web (Twitter, Foursquare, WordPress, etc.). Users can also access analytics in terms of traffic to their About.me page.
In the battle to become your “single online identity,” About.me certainly certainly has an aesthetic and utilitarian edge over say, your drab Google profile. And its list of advisers–Kevin Rose, Om Malick, Tim Ferriss, Andy Weissman–is impressive. But we have yet to see anyone outside of the tech world’s earliest-of-adopters latch on. Which might be why the start-up is making an aggressive push into the streets of New York.TechCrunch, another AOL property, reports that About.me is poised for a big ad blitz this fall on taxis and in-flight ads. It’s also launching a “Face of About.me” contest to get users to sign-up. The three winners with the most votes will be featured on a billboard in Times Square, just like the winners of Photo Hack Day.
Who knew seeing your name in lights held such techie appeal?
