Personal Directory of the future? Or gone in 60 seconds?

May 17, 2011 | Posted by Craig LePan

About.me is a "Custom Profile + Personal Analytics Dashboard" or what I would call "your living tombstone". Is it the personal directory of the future? Or will it be gone before we know it?

The site allows you to create a custom 1 pager that features your bio and organizes all of your social media links in one place. The idea is that you have 1 place to send any contact.

The design interface is easy to use and I spent more time than I'll admit trying out every font and setup option before realizing that no one is going to look at it anyway. Setting up my page reminded me of an older site called Virb, which has now evolved into a monthly subscription site that allows you to build your own website. 

Right now About.me is featuring a free set of printed cards from Moo. Our very own James Bull created his page and ordered his cards complete with a QR code that links you back to your about.me one pager.

The site also offers a dashboard to track your visitors to your about.me page. 

So who would be interested in creating an about.me page? The intro video would suggest that it's for anyone who lives online, and that's all of us. I thought this site would be useful to recent design grads looking to get their names and portfolio out there, but if you're just out of school and looking to prove yourself you wouldn't want to be limited by a WYSIWYG set up. The majority of people with a wide collection of social media links already have them in one place.

I think the site is well designed and has a great user interface for designing your own page, but I have to admit I'm a little confused as to why anyone would use this. One thing is for certain, someone is collecting a lot of data.

Take a look, at my profile page: http://about.me/Craiglepan (I'll be able to see on my dashboard if anyone actually does). Set up your profile and leave it here in the comments, let me know what you think.