With LinkedIn having established its central role for online business networkers, a flurry of startups have emerged to let people present a new, and often prettier, face to their work profiles - including About.me, Zerply (who I covered back in May), and starting today, Path.to, a network that aims to let you customize your business profile and tap into the power of your network for meaningful endorsements that will help you stand out from the crowd.

Like Zerply, Path.to starts with the new user pulling in their data from an previously-created profile elsewhere on the Web, and then prompts you to fill out the missing gaps in your profile to better tell the story in the way that you want it to be told, with as much information or as little as you like. Rather than simply listing the places you've worked and the titles you've held at various points in your career, Path.to gains value when you list particular skills that you have used at each stop, setting up the opportunity for your network to endorse you based on your shared experience.


But there's a little touch of magic behind the scenes at Path.to, which makes the endorsement game more than just a vote counter. Darren Bounds, who you also know from projects like Cliqset and Glow.io, writes, "In Path.To all endorsements are not created equal. We’ve built an algorithm that constantly reevaluates and scores each individual in the system. This scoring helps drive the weight of your endorsement within the system."



Without diving to deep into that, which sounds a lot like how Klout assumes a certain value to each individual, Path.to hopes that its endorsement structure and leaderboards will surface the best and most qualified people at every skill, from product management to blogging. The site continually pushes users to get endorsed, saying, "Skill endorsements are the currency of Path.To. They help distinguish you from the crowd by increasing your weighting in and around the site."


For beautiful looking glamor photos and a short personal description, About.me works well. But Zerply and Path.to are all about endorsements and an attractive UI that puts your resume in a friendly light. You can find my Path.to profile here: http://path.to/louisgray

At the end of last month, I highlighted Zerply as an intriguing alternative to About.me or LinkedIn. The professional-looking personal profile network, then in invite-only beta, is now open to the public, so anybody can join and start adding business contacts. While still retaining the beta tag, the site's founders have added a whole list of features that should aid in expanding one's network, seeing site activity, and serendipitous discovery.

While the company is billing the upgrade as a redesign, the improvements are more about function over form in this round.


   New Stats and Notifications on Zerply

As any business network is more powerful with connections to others, the site, like many others, offers the option to connect to Facebook and Twitter to find friends elsewhere on the site, where you can easily save people from these search results to your network/address book. You can now search based on the location of other members, and can click on others' listed location to see additional users in a radius of 50 kilometers, wrote cofounder Christofer Karltop in an email to me last night.


One of the twists to Zerply upon registration is self-tagging with keywords that describe your background. Users can endorse your tags, and these updates are now shown in a notifications tab upon logging into the site. Coming soon, possibly even in the next 24 hours, is the option to receive email notifications when others endorse you or your profile is saved to another's network.

True to practically every social network, casual or business, is the craving for statistics. Zerply now tees this up as well, letting you see how many unique profile visits you have received in the last calendar month or all time, and how many clickthroughs your listed services (such as your downstream social networks) have received.

I liked Zerply enough that I made it my personal profile link on Twitter and you can find me here: http://www.zerply.com/profile/louisgray. If you didn't get an account the last time I wrote up the site, now's the time. The door's open at http://www.zerply.com/.

The market for centralized indentity-driven personal profile pages is getting increasingly interesting, with players like About.me (see writeup) and Google (see writeup) in the mix alongside established social networks such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. One of the newer entrants, nearing exit from private beta, having recently joined the well-regarded 500 Startups accelerator, is a service called Zerply, who aims to connect a hybrid of your professional background with your social profiles.

Like About.me, Zerply profiles are tightly designed. Unlike About.me, which relies heavily on creative background art from the profile owners themselves, Zerply presents multiple themes to select, and once you've provided your social profile accounts and vacuumed up your professional history from either LinkedIn or Facebook, lays out the content in a pleasant way.


Zerply profiles lead with a short one-line description, as you see in most places, including Twitter, and a short bio, which can be anything you like of course. Visitors can download your vCard, email you, or check out your activity from around the Web. Dozens of social sites are supported, including all the regulars.

One's profile is divided into three portions:

• The Basics
• Experience
• Education

The basics is your bio and social networks. Experience includes your employment history. Education includes your degrees. If your LinkedIn already has all this, importing is a breeze, or you just add it yourself. Just takes a few minutes.



Zerply bills itself as "The easiest way to present yourself professionally". It is pretty easy, to be honest. And it is fairly professional. Better looking than LinkedIn, more professional than About.me, reaching a safe middle ground. Of course, it helps Zerply that most folks have already added information about themselves in third party services, so importing is simple. Otherwise, data collection still takes time.


But where they have a distinct disadvantage versus About.me is in the naming. About.me has a smart way to tell people about you. Zerply is a lot less catchy, and it will take some effort for people to do the crazy thing I did, like changing my Twitter "about me" link to Zerply over one of the other sites. Google, Facebook and LinkedIn are no slouches either when it comes to centralized profiles.

Want in to Zerply? I do have a few invites, and you'll get some too, once you sign up. Start with this URL: http://zerply.com/invite/6ANB7VPDCWTz1ng.