The social profile network About.me, which was acquired by AOL in 2011 is continuing to expand its usefulness with a new iOS app that makes interacting with people easier.

About.me for iOS displays your profile beautifully on your device as well as tag people as favorites and find people that are close-by. We haven’t heard much from the product as of late, but it’s clear that AOL is not done adding functionality to it.

If you don’t already have an About.me account, which serves as a virtual business card for you, you can sign up from within the app or just login to your existing one.

On the main screen, you’ll be shown featured profiles much like you are on the current site:

As you dig a bit deeper into profiles, you’ll notice that you can share the people you find on Facebook, Twitter, or via email. This is neat if you’re looking for a new designer to hire at your company and want to exchange notes on potential recruits:

Since you can plug all of your social accounts up to the service, like foursquare, Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook, it’s a good way to socialize with new friends as well. The app also lets you update your own account information quite easily.

The new functionality, called “Who’s Nearby?”, is more of a feature we’d see in an app like Highlight, allowing you to explore the network of folks who have a profile based on where they’re located. This is an ultra-social feature and it’s interesting to see AOL taking the product in this direction, since there’s already a lot of competition:

For me personally, I don’t use the site as much as I used to. It was fun at first to change your “cover photo” which is a beautiful high-resolution profile picture, but once you’ve connected all of your services, there’s not much of a reason to go back to it. It’ll be interesting to see if this new app kicks up interactions between users, or drives anymore traffic to the blogs that are hooked up to it.

➤ About.me for iOS

With “Search Plus Your World” turning its search engine into a wonderland for its social product, Google+, the company is now taking advantage of the fact that you may in fact Google yourself too.

During an R&D ego search today, I found that Google is now asking me to complete my profile on Google+:

I was pretty surprised that the request from Google took up so much real-estate in the search results, but I suppose that the company is trying everything to get people to come back and continue to use the product. As you might remember, the company announced that Google+ has 90 million global users, with 60% active engagement. This would appear to be a tactic to increase those engagement numbers.

Along with Google adding “Ask on Google+” links to the bottom of all of its search results, it looks like every facet of its social network will begin creeping up into search, which is of course its biggest product.

Thanks to a company called SpinningHat, you can forever memorialize your favorite profile design forever. Or as many times as you plan on taking a shower.

The “Social Shower Curtain” will set you back $23, but it’s worth it for the “lol” factor. Plus, it’s retro already, isn’t it?

The unauthorized Facebook shower curtain comes complete with a transparent window where your profile picture would normally go. If someone dares to enter the bathroom during your morning splash-session, they’ll be able to check your status in real-time. The shower curtain is set to ship in February.

Let’s hope Facebook doesn’t plan on suing like Apple is over the Steve Jobs doll.

➤ Social Shower Curtain

With the introduction of Timeline on Facebook, a new feature that allows you to add a “cover” photo has become all the rage. It’s very MySpace like, in that you can spruce up your profile with pictures of yourself, something you saw on a trip, or perhaps something artistic.

Right now, covers and profile photos are the only way to personalize the visual tone of your Facebook profile, as the rest of the site is pretty uniform looking.

Naturally, people want to impress you with their cover photos, so one site decided to dedicate all of its efforts to finding the most visually stunning pieces of art that you can add to your own Facebook profile. The site is called Fookcover, and it has hand-picks the best of the best.

Cover me

Fookcover has sorted these beautiful cover photos into categories like nature, abstract, urban, and cute. You can even submit your own by emailing them to hello@fookcover.com. But be sure to send them a photo with the following dimensions; 851×315 .PNG format.

These are a few of my favorites:

Unfortunately, you have to add the cover photo yourself by downloading it, but that’s probably because Facebook hasn’t exposed the cover photo feature to developers yet. You can however click “Add cover” to share your favorites from Fookcover on your wall.

I imagine that a slew of these sites will pop up, but it looks like the folks behind this one have a keen eye for design and art, and I’m enjoying what they’ve carefully curated so far. I like how the site gives full attribution to the creators, a nice tough to create a budding community around this idea. Hopefully Facebook never allows animated GIFs to be added to your profile though, or it will turn into MySpace. Yikes.

➤ Fookcover

Read the latest Facebook news every day at TNW Facebook.

One lucky Twitter user has noticed some changes to his Twitter stream.

According to his post, Twitter has made more changes to its Timeline feature, which is your stream of incoming tweets.

Tweets will now expand when you click them, rather than show up on the right hand side. I personally found that experience to be hit or miss, with full conversations sometimes not showing up at all.

In my opinion, Twitter’s number one issue has been quickly finding any contextual information around a tweet or a reply. Will these changes make things better?

Media will show up in an expanded Timeline tweet view, making it easier to check out a photo or video attached to a tweet quickly and resuming your Twitter scanning:

Along with these tweaks, retweet and profile information have received new treatments, also staying close to the Twitter Timeline, rather than on the right hand side.

Here is a video showcasing the changes:

These changes make context around a tweet readily available without taking you away from your Timeline. These are smart changes by Twitter; hopefully the company will roll it out to the whole user base soon. With more focus on letting users consume more with doing less, Twitter will keep users engaged.

As you have read, Facebook is slowly launching its new Timeline feature, it calls “The Story of your Life”. This is Facebook’s attempt to show your information, photos, likes, and shared items in a way that makes more sense to you and your friends.

I’m taking a look at my profile now in “Timeline mode”, and it’s quite interesting.

Cover

Most notably, you’ll notice the large image at the top of the timeline page, called the “Cover”. This is customizable with any image. Since it’s in high resolution, it will focus on whatever part of the image you like, a great way to get very creative here.

Views

All of the information you share on your wall is in more of a widget format. This makes things easier to read and interact with.

The Activity Log

The activity log lets you and others (if you let them) go through your whole timeline since you started using Facebook. All of your posts that you’ve made public are available to friends, and everything you’ve ever posted on Facebook is available to you privately.

Quite honestly, it’s gorgeous, and is way more functional and readable than the original Facebook profile you’re familiar with.

Stories

The real powerful part is the infinite scroll in which you can literally go through someone’s history without clicking buttons for “more”. It’s seamless, and more visually stimulating by a long shot.

Our partners and friends over at Simply Zesty have put together this wonderful video tour:

You can sign up right now to get in line to get your Timeline. But remember, it does take the place of your current profile.

Facebook has now become your “Social Desktop”.

Zerply, still in private beta, is a tool to create a professional profile that can be shared publicly.

With so many profile creators out there and the never-ending privacy concerns of users, Zerply helps you share just the right amount of information you need.

Zerply claims to be the easiest way to present yourself professionally – rightfully so. In a four-step process, you can enter your personal information, add your profile pages, include an avatar and save. Take a look at the end result.

Click the steps for a clearer idea of the process:

With the option of allowing multiple accounts per network and the ability to add custom networks and IM accounts, Zerply is a good and flexible tool to help you customize your profile.

You get to choose out of three themes: The Poster Child, The Conservative and The American. Inviting three people will unlock a fourth theme titled The Swiss.

Although in private beta, the platform was stable, quick and one of the easiest platforms designed to help you create a professional profile.

We’ve got six invites to give away. Leave your email address in the comments field and we’ll be happy to share. First come, first served.