Blogging Blog

Another Cool Profile Widget: imagini

[This is another flash widget, so the first images are screenshots, and the flash images will go under the cut to speed loading on the main page.]

The imagini widget isn't exactly an avatar, and it doesn't aggregate your networks, but it is a nice little widget that could spark up an About Page or MySpace profile. It's clearly designed for younger folk, but I had a good time with it nonetheless.

It offers a series of questions and images; and from the images you choose emerges your Visual DNA:

Imagini calculates your VisualDNA™ from your choices.
It's a new way of communicating using images instead of words.

It's fun, quick and free...

Each tab has nicely written text, presumably describing the user -- and I have to say, it's not far off. It's easy to say that, because I think it's designed to flatter. Which is fine with me.

There is also a social networking aspect to this widget; along the side of the screen the service lists other people with similar Visual DNA -- though I'm not sure similarity equals a good match?

In summary:

Pros:

• Visually appealing
• Very easy to use
• Easily shared
• Fun

Cons:

• It is still beta, though I've noticed no problems using it
• Flash, which some folks avoid
• Not a lot of creative scope

See mine below the cut:

   

Cool Avatars & Network Aggregation Profiles: profilebuilder

This profile can be embedded in a page, so that all information is visible (this is another flash profile, so the first images are screenshots, and the flash images will go under the cut to speed loading on the main page):

Click image to see larger:

or it can be quietly linked on a sidebar, like this:

Sharon Brogan 

Click that blue P, and up pops the profile (assuming you have flash enabled.)

I think profilebuilder has the most potential of any I've seen to be useful for both personal and professional/ business bloggers. It's the most flexible; it can be funny and quirky, or sleek and professional, depending on what you want to do with it.

Your profile is your online place, it's the place to put anything you want — such as your interests, activities and contacts. From now on, wherever you sign your name, you sign your icon with it.

Establish a consistent profile across the web;
Manage what people know about you;
Present the specific information that different types of people see;
Enable people to easily find out more about you;
Track when and where your profile is accessed.

You can make several different profiles -- or differing versions of a profile -- to link in many different places. You could have one, expansive profile for a personal page, that includes hobbies and family photos; and another, more circumspect, profile for a professional site that includes a resume and contact information, but doesn't highlight your MySpace page.

...you can add your Profil.es icon next to your name anywhere on the web, including your website, your email, social networking sites, message boards, etc. Your Profil.es are in your hands! [More linking options, including automatic blog and email insertion are coming shortly!]

The founder links his profile in a signature on his blog posts:

Boyan Josic, Founder & CEO 

This is extremely flexible. You can design your own channels and select your own content. It really seems that the sky's the limit with this.

So, if this is so cool, flexible, and useful, why aren't you seeing it everywhere?

I have some guesses, below the cut:

 

Cool Avatars & Network Aggregation Profiles: mEgo

I'm going to review a few of these over the next couple of weeks, because they're fun. I had planned to start with profilebuilder, but woke this morning to find many hits on Watermark from mEgo, which linked to me (and several others) on its homepage. So I will begin with this, which is my favorite anyway.

Here is a quick sample, collected from browsing on the home page, of the range of visual possibilities this offers:

The actual flash versions are animated, and interactive. The buttons take you to content selected by the user.

mEgo was created with the mission to make managing and sharing your online selves a more coherent, fun and useful experience...

Think of your mEgo as having two parts:

• A physical body and background that you design
• and
• Customizable content (consisting of polls, feeds & profile data) that is categorized and linked to "hot spots" on your mEgo's body.

When you are creating your mEgo, you use the Looks editor to design the appearance of your mEgo. You can change your look as often as you want. You can also upload your own pictures, edit them with our Crop & Style photo editing tool and modify other background settings.

You then use the Feed and Content editors to further customize your mEgo with your own personal data.

This is probably not appropriate for use on a professional or business webpage -- unless you happen to be a professional creative -- but it seems ideal for a personal weblog. This one also works on MySpace, which I gather is picky about these things.

Pros:

• Fun, attractive, and very customizable.
• Inspires creativity -- a real opportunity to think about and express yourself.
• A lot of content in a small space.

Cons:

• This is beta. Beta = buggy. I had a hard time getting the home page to load today; and when it did load, it was slow, and/or crashed my browser. Perhaps they have been more successful than anticipated, and are overloaded.
• Not visible to those who disable flash.

I had a lot of fun making mine, which you can see below the cut:

   

TypePad Widgets

I am an incorrigible Blog Bling addict, as my regular readers know. This addiction was partly responsible for instigating this very blog -- a place to put what won't fit on my regular blog. TypePad knows its users. Today they announced:

We’re excited to introduce TypePad Widgets, a new feature for TypePad that will bring dozens of features to your blog from the sites you're already using.  What’s a Widget, you ask? It could be a list of your most recent photos, or a topic-oriented search box, or a stats counter, or ads that help you make money, or a badge to help your users subscribe to your feed, or even a Flash game or a chat window. We call it "bling for your blog." We're launching with dozens of widgets from more than 30 partners, and more are on the way.

They are offering widgets in several categories, including Commerce, Content, Music, Photos and Video (but not from Flickr?!), Publishing Tools, and Search (but not from Google, or Yahoo.) Some of these look useful, or fun; some seem to require more bandwidth than they're worth -- but we each have our own way of measuring that, don't we?

You may anticipate that at least some of these will be making an appearance on this sidebar. And no doubt these toys will be available for other blogging platforms soon, if they aren't already.