RealMee

Yesterday Google announced they will start featuring Google Profiles on the bottom of the first search results page when people search for someone on their name. Obviously, this is a huge step for their Profiles offering. Check out the following insightful posts on this announcement: here, here, here and here.

So, what does this mean for RealMee?

First of all we think this will raise general awareness around the subject of ego search. This will obviously benefit RealMee because it will make the pool of people interested in solutions for this issue larger.

Secondly, our proposition differs from Google’s on the following aspects:

1. With RealMee, you can make a personal profile under a personal domain, e.g. www.yourname.com, which isn’t possible with Google Profiles. This means a Google Profile is always Google branded whereas a RealMee profile can become completely personal without a single mention or visibility of the RealMee brand.
2. With RealMee, you choose what information and how much is available on your profile. With Google Profiles, that’s also the case but you only get featured in the search results if you move past a certain threshold of personal information.

Hence, more options for people to choose from to control what people see when they look for them online which is a good thing.

You might have noticed it already but last week we launched a new version of RealMee.

In short, what is new in this version?

1. Redesign of whole site: homepage, edit section and profiles. The most important piece was the profile edit environment. We wanted to make it easier for you to edit and update your profile sow we went from one, tall edit page to an environment that contains multiple tabs. This should make it easier and simpler to work with RealMee.
2. Design: be able to choose from different profile designs. We will introduce more themes shortly and will also offer you the possibility to upload your own stylesheets.
3. Link personal domain: if you control a personal domain, such as www.yourname.com, you can link it for free to your RealMee profile page.
4. URL rename: you can personalize everything behind the top level domain www.realmee.com. For example, I have renamed www.ronald-carpentier.com/1/ronald-carpentier in www.realmee.com/ronald-carpentier to make the communication of my profile to others even more powerfull, e.g. in my email signature.
5. Resume module: make a resume in a format that is hResume compliant. This is a microformat which enables other webservices to use the resume part of your RealMee profile if you want to. It also means that if you have a LinkedIn profile with a resume section for example, that you are now able to import that resume into your RealMee profile because LinkedIn has also implemented hResume. BTW we already know that in some cases the import functionality gives some errors in case of LinkedIn. The cause is rooted in the fact that LinkedIn publishes some HTML that is not fully hResume compliant which can lead to errors on our side. We are looking into it right now.

Do you have any feedback? Fire away in the comments!