At GizaPage, It's All About Your (Social Media) Brand
GizaPage is a new "social network organizer" - not aggregator, mind you - what they do is different. Instead of pulling in your social media posts and updates from around the web into a content stream like FriendFeed, they create a web page which features the social media profiles you link, each in their own tab and each page served from the social network's own domain. It's like loading up a tabbed web browser with links to your Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc., but all easily accessible from one custom URL (yourname.gizapage.com).
Recently, GizaPage took their personal branding feature one step further. Now, as an alternative to using the the GizaPage vanity URL, you can host your GizaPage as a masked subdomain. This is one of the handful of features in the service's latest update that goes to show they're more interested in being a tool for social media users than they are simply being a destination web site.
All Your Profiles, One URL
If you maintain a personal brand or even a brand for a company which has a presence across numerous social networks, you can now point your fans, followers, and customers to a specific domain name that you own - and one that doesn't say "GizaPage" anywhere in it. For example: socialmedia.brandname.com. This page can now be customized to blend in with your own branding by changing the background, the color, the font, and the layout.
As you expand your presence to new social media properties, you can easily add them to your tabbed list using GizaPage's well-designed dashboard interface for page management. You can also rearrange the order of the tabs so your Facebook appears in the line up ahead of your MySpace page, for instance.
The GizaCard
To draw people into your social media world, GizaPage has also added a new feature called a "GizaCard" that displays the icons for all the social media profiles you set up along with your name or brand name. The card can be embedded on any site, blog, or online profile that supports embeds. With one click on the card, your entire social media lineup loads within a new web page so visitors can browse through all your profiles at once and friend or follow you on the sites they choose.
Not only is the GizaCard convenient for you and your site's visitors, it's also worth noting that GizaPage hasn't mucked up the card by slapping their own branding on top of it. Nowhere on the card is "GizaPage" mentioned - it's simply a tool that links you back to their service.
Stats and More
After implementing these new features, you can then take advantage of GizaPage's newly launched statistics section which details page views, visits, and other useful stats that can help you determine the success (or lack thereof) of your various social media profiles across the web. In the future, the company plans on ramping up this section to become more robust, possibly charging a premium for access to the more detailed stats.
All of these upgrades are available now for free except for the subdomain feature. That will cost $4.99 per month in the future. However, GizaPage is offering it for free for a year if you sign up by July 31st - if interested, you can do so from here.
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I wouldn't have bet that making an old-school website with a frame that displays distant websites would be worth an article on most respected blogs. (yeah i know, it's JS frame, but still..)
The technological value added looks closed to zero. And the value for the user, well... I don't get it.
(note: a live running page on http://okh.gizapage.com/)
I doubt if this will be of any value.. A user who is already following someone in one of their clickstream ( facebook/Ning/Twitter ) will have zeo utility of following them on multiple social media channels
I tried this service out this morning and there's definite pros and cons.
Pros:
1. People who don't have their own blog, but who are active on many different social services can set up their own domain (custom domains for a small fee are available as stated in the post above) and get all the profiles in one place. I could see that being a reasonable draw for non-blogging digital citizens, but it doesn't seem remarkable enough to achieve a critical mass of non-blogging users.
2. The available stats section has a lot of potential, but it hasn't been implemented well enough yet to tell. If the stats prove valuable enough in the first year, they may get some traction there, but they have yet to be proven. The stats will have to include total views of profiles outside of Gizapage to be useful - I'd be impressed if they figured out how to do that across services.
Negatives:
1. Utility for user management and following is low for people who already have a tight community and interact regularly on twitter, facebook etc, especially for those that already have ingrained interaction habits etc.
2. People who already use their blogs as an aggregation point wont need this - it'll likely be a profile that they set up and never check or use - does anyone monitor just one person on micro-blogging and social networks anymore?
3. The "find friends" process is poorly implemented and doesn't take into account the current social culture. Finding friends requires either an upload of your email contacts (feels spammy and is not social) or a connection to LinkedIn - there's no option for using other social graphs like Twitter, FacebookConnect or Friendfeed etc. They really need to re-think this process and follow best practices that have been implemented elsewhere.
4. There are a few calls to action built into the UI like "promote your profile via email" that are going to get abused and get them bad P.R.
It's not an aggregator, it's an I-ggregator.
Brilliant application. Should be very useful for individuals and businesses. Instead of putting out multiple contact details for the ever growing number of social media sites, one can put out just one URL.
So also for business, with a single link, website visitors can visit the social media presence of the brand and come back to the website
Seem like a great application