Facebook recently launched a new feature to their fairly closed site called Pages. Everyone is hung up on the advertising part of pages. But, a savvy networker can create a page as an external profile. Unless you are a Facebook member you really can't see much. But now with a Page you can create something everyone can see. Let's try it out:
As you can see from the image above, when you try and access my Facebook profile you just get a login page. Not real cool but that's how it is. Now, if you create a Page in your Facebook account you can have some public information exposed including a picture and some summary information:
The area in red to the right is where I think Facebook should allow for additional content. When you are logged into Facebook there are several sections of details.
The bottom area in red is where you are able to provide some type of summary information. A web site link, a description, a mission statement and product information. You could however set your page up to provide links to several of your web sites, a little about you and maybe what you do for a living.
This isn't a perfect solution but at least someone can see who you are without actually being a member. There is one draw back to this though, no vanity URL, mine looks like this,
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=6351869262, and I'm not sure how search engine friendly that is. You could do some type of domain forwarding like profile.digitalthom.com and point to this page but it seems like a lot of work.
Here is a
link to iJustine's Facebook page. Here is her blog
post about it.
Oh, and what would be really cool, is to put an invitation to join Facebook on your profile page. You really can't get the full experience unless you're a member. And being a member of Facebook isn't a bad thing.
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