Review: Dust off Your Profile Page With Flavors.me
I got invited to try out the new Flavors.me (invite code: readwriteweb) service this past week. In a knee-jerk reaction, I wanted to dismiss it as stupid, but was urged by someone to really check it out. I’m very glad I did as they’ve taken a fresh take on the stale profile page.
Profile pages have become awkward wastelands of static information necessary as a gatekeeper to site access. Quickly tap out your favorite movies, music, books, quotes, etc. so you can move onward to the fun social aspect of hot property du-jour. When’s the last time you updated your Facebook favorite movies? Don’t think, I’ll answer for you: never.
Enter the profile aggregator model a la Google Profiles. Simply pull in the links to all of your contextually relevant presences across the web as seen below:
It’s still static**, but at least it points you to some dynamic destinations. Unfortunately, even Google can’t get past having the crusty dusty questions that will never get updated and are better imported dynamically: Interests, My Superpower, etc. I won’t even go into Google’s marketing problems around voice and edge.
Though created before Google Profiles, FriendFeed aggregates all of the dynamic feeds from those same social presences into a heterogeneous ugly feed. Unfortunately, to segregate those feeds by presence, you must leave FriendFeed and visit that presence. Verdict = “Meh”.
Enter Flavors.me.
They pull in your dynamic presence, with specific treatment for Flickr, Tumblr, Twitter, Vimeo, Netflix, Goodreads, Last.fm and Facebook along with a generic RSS feed (I’ve thrown in Disqus, Backtype and Delicious just for kicks). All of these dynamic feeds are rendered dynamically on the page so you don’t have to leave.
Unlike Google and FriendFeed, Flavors.me learned something from the Ajax Startpage gold rush of 2006 - user experience matters. The intuitive page building/management UX is sleek, elegant and intuitive evoking a true designer spirit rather than superfluous engineering options. Focused customization and layout options encourage creativity as evidenced by their gorgeous user directory.
My suggestions for improvements would be:
- adding more treatments
- custom domain names
- WebFinger management (Google Profiles does this)
- native access to your pulbic DropBox or Drop.io for static files (ie. resume, headshot)
Try it for yourself.
** Yes, I know, the Picassa gallery widget is dynamic. Why they chose to only integrate Picassa and not an arbitrary RSS feed gallery, who knows. Maybe they’ve never heard of Flickr.
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Mini Ideation: There needs to be a service exclusively focused on aggregating quotes and providing a feed for external consumption. I know it sounds dumb, but it’s the last component of the profile puzzle that doesn’t have a more capable external dynamic management service. It could be a focused version of one of those social annotation services like Diigo.
