Social networking sites like ActiveRain are the Internet flavor of the month right now. And while I’ve heard lots of good things on the growth of ActiveRain’s community – if you’re like me, you’re probably feeling a little stretched thin at times trying to deal with your Myspace profile, your personal blog, your company blog, your LinkedIn profile etc. etc. etc. One more site to maintain is a little overwhelming.
Ziki.com is an interesting concept that hopes to solve this problem – and is a model I think ActiveRain would do well to emulate for the real estate community. Basically, Ziki aims to become the central clearing house for all information about you on the web. You can think of it as kind of like your own private wikipedia entry.
Setting up a profile on Ziki is fairly straightforward. You can even set up one profile for your company and another personal entry as well. Ziki asks you to tag your profiles with what types content your interested in (I tagged “real estate”, “web 2.0”, “marketing” and “internet”, for example) and what you’re looking in getting out of the network; finding capital, selling advertising, promoting your company, that sort of thing. As the service expands, it promises to introduce you to like-minded individuals.
Once that step’s complete however, you can begin adding your feeds to your profile. You can pull any RSS feeds you currently publish and ziki will compile them together into an up-to-the-minute digest of your own verbosity. Throw into the mix links to your profiles on other sites such as LinkedIn, eBay, Amazon and others and you begin to can create a fairly comprehensive profile of your online presence.
Of course all of this raises the important issue of privacy and whether or not aggregating all of this data on a site like Ziki somehow compromises your Internet identity. My argument here would be that by choosing to participate in any of these online forums you’ve already done away with much of your “privacy”. Just Google your name sometime and see how many results come back (at last count, there were over 12,800 hits for mine). What I like about Ziki, and others like it (Suprglu.com and hopefully ActiveRain), is that they give you a way to reclaim some editorial control on how your identiy is constructed.
I think ActiveRain should begin to provide similar functionality to real estate professionals – in addition to being a blogging platform, it should become a one-stop shop for everything that compromises their Real Estate 2.0 identity.
