You have profiles on almost every social networking website from Facebook to Flickr to LinkedIn. The next part is how do you create a single web page (let’s call it your virtual business card) that will help people easily explore your various online social identities and also connect with you on common networks where they too may have a presence.
Display all your Online Social Profiles on one Web page
If you have already have a blog, creating a virtual business card is almost as easy as dragging some icons in your sidebar and linking them to your respective social profiles. But for people who don’t have websites or need an all-one-page to showcase their social profiles without any clutter, here are some web services that might come really handy.
Chi.mp – You normally have to pay around $10 per year to buy a domain name on the Internet but with chi.mp, you get a free domain name (like amitagarwal.mp) to display all your social profiles and other online activities in one place.
Chi.mp will be the owner of you reserved domain though you can buy it from them anytime for a fee of course. Your chi.mp URL is OpenID enabled so you can use it to log into other websites like Yahoo! or Google Friend Connect.
OnePage – You may use this service for creating your virtual business card as well as for sharing your lifestream or what you do online – see example.
The interface of OnePage is pretty awesome but they are yet to add support for Facebook and some popular IM services. The service is in closed beta but you may use the code "labnol" to get yourself an account.
FriendFeed Badge – FriendFeed offers an extremely customizable widget that can have any width and you can completely remove all the branding from the profile badge before embedding.
If you know a bit of CSS, you can hack this badge to make it look the way you want.
Retaggr - If you are looking to embed your social business card in your website or youremail signature, Retaggr is probably a good choice.
With Retaggr, you can import profiles from almost any social networking site on the web and share them either as an index card or as a life stream. There’s a email option in the profile card as well so other may reach you without you having to reveal your email address.
MyBlogLog is another good service that offers these "about me" widgets both in JavaScript and plain HTML for use in Outlook emails and social profiles.
Card.ly – The services that we discussed so far are actually life-streaming applications that also offer a way to share your social profiles from one place. Card.ly is different.
It’s purely for creating "virtual business cards" that now only look attractive (see example) but you can also embed them in web pages. Go for the premium version to remove all the branding or for hosting the card on your own domain.
Google Profiles – Grab a vanity URL for your Google Profile if you haven’t done so already and what you get is a personal portal that has your recent photos plus links to your blog and other social profiles.
You should also enable the ‘Send a message’ option so that anyone with a Google Account can email you without knowing your email address – see example.
Create a Google Profile Badge
Here’s an undocumented trick that will help you create an embeddable badge for your Google Profile very similar to FriendFeed.
Log into your Google Reader account and view the HTML source code of that page. You’ll see a JavaScript variable called "USER_PROFILE_ID" – select the value of that variable and copy it to the clipboard. Replace xxx in the following URL with that value.
http://google.com/s2/widgets/ProfileCard?uid=xxx
You can now embed the profile badge in your web pages using the IFRAME tag – see example.
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