Today, Gizapage is launching a set of new features to optimize your Gizapage’s profile visibility and design. Gizapage offers users to gather all their online profiles in one page and make them more discoverable.
So what’s new with Gizapage? First you can add your own background image Twitter-style! I actually encountered an error while uploading my image – a 1K Gif, no biggie – so I could not see if you could repeat the image or not.
More interesting, you can apply your own URL to your Gizapage profile. With Facebook releasing vanity urls a few weeks ago, Gizapage blows it all up (it was on their roadmap) by dropping the gizapage.com. Users pay $4.95 per month for this privilege, but it is free if you apply your own URL before July 31st !
With the introduction of premium customization features, GizaPage is helping users take control of their Web 2.0 social identity, “ said GizaPage founder and CEO, Amit Jaipuria. “From having a personal URL to customizing your GizaPage profile, we’re letting you shape the social networking persona you want to present to others.”
Even if it is free for a year, redirecting the URL that contains your name to your Gizapage page is quite an important move in your online branding strategy. How will people find your Gizapage page? A personalized URL usually looks good on a business card. Gizapage also added a link to submit your profile directly to the Google Base, which helps to make yourself more discoverable on search results. Also, the team is launching a profile widget, to promote your profile anywhere on the Web:
(widget not available anymore)
The embed code is a little messy 🙂
With those tools, you should be able to get clicks and visits to your Gizapage profile. Now how will you know if a Gizapage profile is worth your dollar? (will this grow your connections across social platforms?) How many Gizapage friends you will make is an indicator of how well it works. This data is a weak indicator, but this is unfortunately all you have, and my guess would be that Gizapage’s next features will offer a Mybloglog-style analytics tool to make the service more engaging (wild guess, high stakes!).
I didn’t apply xaviervespa.com to my profile. It’s not about Gizapage though: There isn’t a social network that has convinced me yet to re-direct my personalize URL to my social profile. For Gizapage, I have created the subdomain http://gizapage.hyveup.tv, just to test how it works. I will admit that I was not really convinced by the concept the first time it was pitched to me, but I am slowly starting to see how brands could utilize this new service.