With so many places to position your identity on the Web these days, from social networks to blogs, personal profiles, custom pages like About.me, resumes and so on, presenting one's central presence with a domain that bears your own name is increasingly valuable. While at times, I'd considered renaming this blog to not be so eponymous, it's served me well. Having louisgray.com for more than 10 years, and having registered it through the end of this decade, at least, means that when people put my name on the Web, they'll find content that I have created, in the way that I want it presented and ordered. And thanks to it being hosted on Blogger, backed by Google's strong "Takeout" project, which lets me easily export it and move it elsewhere if I need to, I am not bound to a third party network representing who I am. My domain is owned by me, and will be here for years to come.

The recent trend of some high profile folks, who have earned serious respect for their own entrepreneurial efforts already, to point their eponymous domains to Google+ or other networks seems short-sighted to me. While I am obviously a big supporter of Google+ and am voting with my own activity there, at the expense of other networks that are less engaged and rewarding, I do not have any plans to move my domain to redirect to that page, and suggest others don't as well.

If Google+ (or other networks like it) present an engaged audience with high quality content, and so far it does, the best way to reflect that on your own domain is to bring it to your domain, where you control it. With FriendFeed, Facebook, Google Reader, Twitter and even Google Buzz before it, tools have existed to help you share your feeds, your most recent items, and highlights on your own blog. As Google+ matures and tools emerge from the Mountain View mother ship or from the developer community, I will be bringing more than a "Follow Me" button to my site - hopefully my most recent posts and statistics will make it here as well. But when you look for "Louis Gray" on the Web, it should be my own domain that returns - not About.me, Google Profiles, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or anybody else.

When FriendFeed catapulted on to the scene in late 2007 and early 2008, we heard some of the same rumblings of people saying they were going to stop blogging outright in exchange of using the network. Others found Twitter's 140 character style made the best sense for their output, and their blogging decreased or stopped. While I don't really mind people being comfortable with different styles and migrating to what seems fit, I am hesitant to endorse forwarding your identity to a third party domain you do not control. Of course, with Google being Google, Google+ is much more likely to be around and supported strongly in the long haul than was FriendFeed, which was essentially abandoned by Facebook to wither away like a rumpled jacket left on an elementary schoolyard playground.

Kevin Rose is a smart guy and has done some good for the Web and I expect this will continue. So too has Bill Gross. Tom Anderson has catapulted in visibility on Google+ from having almost disappeared after MySpace's fade, and that's fun to see. Google+ has captured the imagination of these top guys and many more who see it as a vibrant alternative to the boring status quo that we've been shovel-fed for the last few years. But I don't think they should give their identities and domains away to the service. Because in 10 years, 20 years, 30... you'll still be you, but services and companies evolve.

At the end of last month, I highlighted Zerply as an intriguing alternative to About.me or LinkedIn. The professional-looking personal profile network, then in invite-only beta, is now open to the public, so anybody can join and start adding business contacts. While still retaining the beta tag, the site's founders have added a whole list of features that should aid in expanding one's network, seeing site activity, and serendipitous discovery.

While the company is billing the upgrade as a redesign, the improvements are more about function over form in this round.


   New Stats and Notifications on Zerply

As any business network is more powerful with connections to others, the site, like many others, offers the option to connect to Facebook and Twitter to find friends elsewhere on the site, where you can easily save people from these search results to your network/address book. You can now search based on the location of other members, and can click on others' listed location to see additional users in a radius of 50 kilometers, wrote cofounder Christofer Karltop in an email to me last night.


One of the twists to Zerply upon registration is self-tagging with keywords that describe your background. Users can endorse your tags, and these updates are now shown in a notifications tab upon logging into the site. Coming soon, possibly even in the next 24 hours, is the option to receive email notifications when others endorse you or your profile is saved to another's network.

True to practically every social network, casual or business, is the craving for statistics. Zerply now tees this up as well, letting you see how many unique profile visits you have received in the last calendar month or all time, and how many clickthroughs your listed services (such as your downstream social networks) have received.

I liked Zerply enough that I made it my personal profile link on Twitter and you can find me here: http://www.zerply.com/profile/louisgray. If you didn't get an account the last time I wrote up the site, now's the time. The door's open at http://www.zerply.com/.

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.

Montenegro, a small country tucked into Southeast Europe, bordered by Bosnia and Hezergovina, Serbia, Croatia and Abania, has just over 600,000 residents. Among its most valuable exports of late has been its attractive .me domain, the country code TLD behind fast-growing personal page service About.me, who was snapped up by AOL almost immediately after public unveiling, and now says they are nearing 1 million unique accounts - well beyond the population of Montenegro itself, after being open for about 4 1/2 months. Company founder Tony Conrad, also known for selling Sphere into AOL back in 2008, recounted the story behind getting the brand name at a Media Roundtable day at AOL West Coast headquarters yesterday in Palo Alto, and says adoption has been phenomenal.

About.me was initially referred to as "Pumpkinhead", but was never intended to go by that name even from the service's inception. Conrad said the plan all along was to acquire the about.me domain, and it took considerable cajoling and back and forth calls with Montenegro government representatives between 11 at night Pacific time and 4 am to push for the service's getting the attractive name. All told, he said there were thirteen phone calls, each one going higher up the food chain and having a larger audience. Eventually, he gained the domain name, telling the Montenegro officials that the exposure of the new TLD would be more enough payback for giving up the lucrative URL.

"If you call them, they will say it was the best thing they have ever done," Conrad gushed yesterday. "About.me was the perfect marriage with the product we were about to offer, and it was going to get them incredible exposure."


The idea behind About.me came from the far-flung URLs many of us are using to define ourselves, be it our blogs, our Twitter accounts, Facebook profiles, LinkedIn resumes, and more. Conrad wanted to offer something controlled by the individual that could aggregate content from disparate sites, present a clean visual appeal, and avoid the step of going to Google to "dumpster dive" and find the right person in a sea of names.

"The opportunity was to create a page that was truly about myself," he said, "something simple that you could put in your email signature that makes sense."

The appeal of a simple "About Me" page has struck a chord with initial users, who are reportedly adopting the service faster even than well-known sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Foursquare, something Conrad gave credit to Twitter for, as the service has been leveraged to increase virality and visibility of the service. Now, he sees many people using the platform in creative ways beyond a simple dynamic business card, including "tons of baby announcements", and job searches.

Wanting to avoid the common aggregator problem of enabling scads of far-flung third party services (see FriendFeed or others), About.me will be introducing an API in Q3 that lets external sites integrate with the platform directly - beyond those that were "obvious and strategic for us to do", Conrad said.


For those of us initially skeptical on About.me's mission in a world crammed full of start pages and abandoned aggregators, the approach seems to be working - letting people creatively describe themselves with simple onboarding. This has been a key focus for the company even after becoming part of AOL - Tony's second stint there, and one he swore up and down is more fun than the last.

"That regime (following the sale of Sphere) was a bummer," Conrad said. "Under the old regime, I would not have come today (to the media briefing.) I would have been sick. But when I left, Tim Armstrong asked me to be a special advisor and I stayed around the table in a very abstract way. "

Continuing his proximity to AOL, upon About.me's founding, the company was funded by AOL Ventures to the tune of $25,000. During a regular check-in call, Conrad says Armstrong said, 'I want to own more', which came as a surprise as the product was barely off the ground and was considered a project.

"To his credit, he understood the vision we were working towards," Conrad said. "He made a very generous offer that impacted my team in a positive way."

About.me is rapidly approaching a million unique accounts. You can find my About me page here: http://www.about.me/louisgray. Tony Conrad's is here: http://about.me/tonyconrad. The company is hoping to further kickstart registrations and use with a partnership with MOO cards, so if About.me represents you, the URL should look great on your business card.