I just rediscovered my page at about.me: about.me/sorabji. It used to look very different, with alternating fonts and colors, if I recall correctly. Then they washed it down, and for a while I think they even truncated the content. I never quite got about.me, but I made some interesting connections there in its earlier iteration. Now I can’t figure out how to get to the profiles of anybody except those featured on the top page, and that is only achieved by manually typing in the URLs. My earliest associations with sites like this (there are hundreds) is that they are where people go to clean up their online reputation. Or rather, services like reputation.com fill sites like this with antiseptic profiles of people who have something to hide, or some negative search engine results that they want buried on SERP page 95. By no means do I mean to characterize about.me or similar sites as entirely or even a significant percentage of whitewashing online profiles. It is simply how I was introduced to the world of 2nd- and 3rd-tier social networks and their quiet role in manipulating search engine results.
about.me/sorabji
