Two months after About.me ‘bought itself back’ from AOL, spinning itself out as an independent company again, the personal-profile platform has announced that users can now embed YouTube, SoundCloud, Vimeo and blog content in their personal bio box.
Today’s announcement falls a month after the company rolled out its first significant post-AOL feature – Facebook photo and Timeline integration.
As things stand, you can already link out to your profiles on YouTube and Vimeo within your bio box, but embedding actual videos and sounds is new.
How it works
When you go to the ‘Links’ section of ‘Edit Page’ in your profile, you’ll see three buttons – SoundCloud, Your Blog and YouTube or Vimeo.
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The Your Blog section lets you add an RSS Feed to your published online work, and this was already available on About.me, but it was quietly added in the last couple of months.
You simply paste your blog, SoundCloud, YouTube or Vimeo URL into the box, and that’s it. You’re good to go.
It’s worth noting here that you can actually only add one type of content at a time – so if you want to include an RSS Feed to, say, you blog posts then you won’t also be able to embed a video.
About.me was co-founded by Ryan Freitas, Tony Conrad and Tim Young in October 2009, before launching to the public in December the following year. It was swiftly acquired by AOL for what was thought to be tens of millions of dollars.
Then, almost exactly two years later, About.me announced it was becoming a startup again. While full details of the buyout weren’t revealed, Freitas and Conrad said that it was financially backed by the management team and a group of investors “who have backed companies such as WordPress and Google.” AOL kept an 8% stake in About.me, however.
About.me launched a slew of new features last year, including Favorites, which was followed by Compliment which lets you tell someone that you love their About.me page, the way it’s written or you love their background. It then rolled out an official WordPress widget to display a user’s profile in their blog’s sidebar.
We can likely expect at least a few more features rolling off About.me’s proverbial conveyor belt in the coming months.
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