The market for centralized indentity-driven personal profile pages is getting increasingly interesting, with players like About.me (see writeup) and Google (see writeup) in the mix alongside established social networks such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. One of the newer entrants, nearing exit from private beta, having recently joined the well-regarded 500 Startups accelerator, is a service called Zerply, who aims to connect a hybrid of your professional background with your social profiles.

Like About.me, Zerply profiles are tightly designed. Unlike About.me, which relies heavily on creative background art from the profile owners themselves, Zerply presents multiple themes to select, and once you've provided your social profile accounts and vacuumed up your professional history from either LinkedIn or Facebook, lays out the content in a pleasant way.


Zerply profiles lead with a short one-line description, as you see in most places, including Twitter, and a short bio, which can be anything you like of course. Visitors can download your vCard, email you, or check out your activity from around the Web. Dozens of social sites are supported, including all the regulars.

One's profile is divided into three portions:

• The Basics
• Experience
• Education

The basics is your bio and social networks. Experience includes your employment history. Education includes your degrees. If your LinkedIn already has all this, importing is a breeze, or you just add it yourself. Just takes a few minutes.



Zerply bills itself as "The easiest way to present yourself professionally". It is pretty easy, to be honest. And it is fairly professional. Better looking than LinkedIn, more professional than About.me, reaching a safe middle ground. Of course, it helps Zerply that most folks have already added information about themselves in third party services, so importing is simple. Otherwise, data collection still takes time.


But where they have a distinct disadvantage versus About.me is in the naming. About.me has a smart way to tell people about you. Zerply is a lot less catchy, and it will take some effort for people to do the crazy thing I did, like changing my Twitter "about me" link to Zerply over one of the other sites. Google, Facebook and LinkedIn are no slouches either when it comes to centralized profiles.

Want in to Zerply? I do have a few invites, and you'll get some too, once you sign up. Start with this URL: http://zerply.com/invite/6ANB7VPDCWTz1ng.

After owning what would seem to be an attractive and much sought-after domain name, social.com, for more than 15 years, the current owner, Scott Carter, is passing the torch to the highest bidder, after a few halted attempts to drive value from the premium URL didn't take off. Scott, who was the creator behind BigTweet, who I covered back in 2008, is now putting the site up for auction, which might be of interest to any number of startups, established social media players, daily deal flingers or free e-mail accounts.

In 2010, BigTweet converted to Social.com, acting as a bookmarklet that could post to downstream sites (such as Twitter and Delicious), without being considered a competitor to Ping.fm (owned by Seesmic). But that didn't prove lucrative.

Another pivot later, earlier this year, Scott and I traded emails, where he told me he had moved Social.com to act as a multi-user Wordpress site, with users gaining their own social.com as a subdomain for their blog. As he said in March, "Still getting started, so I haven't spent much time promoting it."

So today, it was finally announced the domain itself was up for auction. As Scott wrote, "I've tried a few ideas with it, but never quite found the right way to develop it ..." and on June 8th, Social.com, along with other premium domains, from Data.com, Skills.com, and HorseRacing.com, is going up for bid in an extended auction at the DOMAINfest Barcelona Auction Series.

While I doubt social companies with major brand names (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, etc.) would be interested, maybe others would? Maybe LivingSocial wants Social.com? Maybe SocialText wants Social.com? Maybe there's a new aggregation site that would love to be Social.com? Maybe MySpace will rebrand again? Who knows. Maybe Klout gets Social.com and Data.com and has a field day? We'll find out when the auction completes on June 22nd.

As you know, one of the companies where I sit on the board of advisors is Teens In Tech, the youth geek oriented startup founded by Daniel Brusilovsky. The company has seen some changes in the two years since I partnered up with Daniel and the rest of the team, but the mission remains the same, to bring value to teens looking to get support through community, peer networking and industry advisory. Today, Teens In Tech is announcing their 2011 conference, scheduled for August 5th in Palo Alto. This comes on the heels of the launch of the company's Incubator program, which will help cultivate some exciting startups born from the minds of the next generation.

In the mold of Y! Combinator, TechStars and 500 Startups, the eight-week Incubator program kicks off on June 20th at Appcelerator in Mountain View. Five teams have been selected to participate, who you will no doubt hear about next month and beyond.

On August 5th, participants in the incubator will present as part of a Demo Day at the historically renowned Xerox PARC campus in Palo Alto, alongside this year's conference - which should be a highlight of the event. In addition, the event will feature speakers from Mozilla, Eventbrite, Audrey Capital, Flexibits, Cortex and others. Should be a great day to invigorate teens who are pushing to enter the fast-moving world of startups.

If you want to attend or know somebody who should, we'd love to have you there. Early bird tickets are available for $30 with tickets closer to the time of the event going at $40.

Quora, the nascent question and answer site founded by a small team of former Facebookers, has expanded its mobile capabilities in the last week with the addition of posting questions by SMS, letting you interact with the service via text message, starting initially with US support. While remaining primarily desktop Web centric, this addition opens the door for mobile question posting for impulse queries, and mirrors the heavy reliance on SMS from another Valley high-flier, Twitter, who continues to count its texting users among the most active and most loyal.

Quora, true to form, has made the process of posting questions relatively simple, with single keystroke responses interacting with the system.

   Once Confirmed, I Posted a Question to Quora on SMS

As with the standard product, Quora abhors duplicate questions. Ask a question via SMS, by texting your question to the Quora service (having first added your mobile phone via the site and confirming it on the handset), and Quora will ask you whether you want to follow a similar, existing question, or post the question net new. Not sure if your question has already been submitted? Just enter "M" for More, or click any of the numbers to toggle through (and follow) similar queries.

   Quora Prompted Me to Follow Other Questions or Add It

I tested the service tonight, opting to start with a simple question.

I texted "What is the average lifespan of a beagle"?

Quora whirred into action, suggesting instead "What is the average lifespan of a blog?" and "What is the average lifespan of a race horse"? Opting for more got me "What is the average lifespan of a cell phone?" So there's some work to do. I changed the topic to be more tech-centric, where Quora has thrived, asking instead, "What is it like to be the CEO of a public company?". Unsatisfied with some of the preexisting questions, I just entered "A" to add my question, and it was posted.

   Posting a Question about Being CEO of a Public Company Via SMS

Assuming you do post your question on Quora via SMS, they promise to extend the conversation in the same way. In a post introducing the feature, Shreyes Seshasai wrote, "When you select a question, we'll send you a summary of the top answer on the page, along with a link to the full question page so you can view it in your mobile browser. It's a quick and lightweight way to check answers on the site."

The Question Gets Posted to Quora As Any Other One Would

Quora has lofty aspirations. Making the product more mobile and pervasive, including this introduction of SMS support, will absolutely help. While I didn't find beagle to be the equal to blog or race horse, that's something the service will likely improve on with growth and more data being added to the system.

To find out more on Quora and SMS, check the initial post from last Thursday.