The Next Web

RealMee shows you the way to Google’s top results

Written on February 29, 2008 – 4:00 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

All you online identity experts out there, there’s a new kid on the block. It’s called RealMee, a service that allows people to set up a profile page ‘in seconds’. You can share contact details, add personal stuff such as the school you went to and display videos and widgets. What else is new? You might ask. Well, your blogger is here to tell you.

The service has one main advantage, somehow it makes sure that your page shows up in the top search results. Are they fooling Google? The FAQ says:

No, we are not. We play by the rules set by search engines. This means no cloaking, linkfarming and all those other geeky terms that describe ways of influencing search engines in prohibited ways. We know we cannot build a solid service based on lies. We simply make sure your personal website is found by search engines and the best way to help improve your own ranking is by linking to your own RealMee website from wherever you think it might be relevant, e.g. from your Facebook, LinkedIn, or MySpace profile.

I’ve tested it by searching for some folks from the - not so practical - RealMee index and the RealMee page was always on the first page.

This might not be that relevant for you, since I assume you’re a pretty web-savvy person. Otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this tech blog. You know how to get your blog to the top results. Yet for the less geeky crowd, this could be a handy way to manage their online identity. Now they can finally start to fight those drunk pictures that always show up on Google. And you know what? They owe it to Scoble, since the founders Ronald Carpentier and Hans Helms wrote this on their ‘About us‘ page:

One simple question from Robert Scoble got us thinking: “What if we could just post one post with all the stuff you’d want to appear in Google or Live Search or Yahoo for when people search for your name?” The need was clear. People need to control how they are found when people look for them online.

I hope you like that post!

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google, profile, realmee, scoble, social networks

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FaceBook launches “profile clean-up” tool

Written on January 11, 2008 – 11:57 am
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,

Business card of Facebook Interaction Designer

Facebook is launching a new Profile clean-up tool that will make it easier to manage and clean-up your Facebook profile. Facebook mentions that ‘users are complaining that their own profiles are cluttered, and they have installed so many applications that it has become overwhelming to un-clutter it’.

That sounds kind of familiar as most of us don’t take time to check any of the requests we get on all those social networks and just once a week click the ‘Accept’ button on everything and everyone who wants our attention. It is easier to ‘Just say yes’ to these things than to actually figure out what they want. This does mean that our profiles are becoming less and less attractive to look at and therefor less useful. It seems that Facebook has come to the realization that less can be more.

The tool won’t actually delete stuff from your profile but “Similar to how your computer’s desktop will remind you to get rid of unused icons, this tool will give users the option to move extra profile boxes to an “extended portion” of their profile”. So the clutter will still be there, just hidden behind a “Show my clutter” link.

Lets just hope they also add a ‘Agree to all’ and ‘Delete all “friends” I don’t actually know’ button too.

clutter, facebook, new features, profile

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