With so much of our social and creative content floating around the Web, the idea that we need to find a way to unify it has become incredibly popular. And thanks to the turf wars going on that prevents us from (fully) sharing Instagrams here or Vines there, the same way to collect everything we digitally make is now given even stronger legs to stand on.
Enter Vizify, the landing page app that rolled out this past summer, officially leaves beta today. Vizify, if you need the reminder, isn’t your typical “landing page” tool, however – and that’s a term CEO and co-founder Todd Silverstein shirks.
“I feel like a lot of people have labeled us [a landing page] especially because About.me has rolled back out … but we see ourselves as a personal website, an identity website for yourself,” he says. “We also have a lot of people using it as an online resume for job hunting, and then a lot of people are using it for brand building as well. Those are the three big use cases people are using us for.”
Instead, he sees Vizify (which is now 250,000+ users strong and featuring more than a million visualizations based on user data) as a way to find, unite, and make a gallery to represent yourself – complete with a personalized infographic and datasets about your own Web use and that of your social circle’s.
“AOL was like the walled garden, it was the Internet for a lot of people, and then people suddenly realized, ‘Oh, we can get the Internet wherever we want,'” Silverstein says. “Facebook’s done a great job keeping people building off its platform, but we’re seeing a renewed interest in these deep verticals, these passions and interests. And that means there’s this need to collect that information.”
Still, he clarifies that Vizify is not a social network. But the fully launched Vizify does have two newly added elements: VizCards and the ability to follow other Vizify users.
VizCards are bite-sized, extremely visual, customizable ways to share information about yourself; you can show your life’s balance between work and play, your Myers-Briggs personality type, or your perfect mix of nature and city living. The VizCards bring the same unique, highly visual approach to introducing your digital self as the Vizify profile does, which has become the platform’s calling card.
For the launch, Vizify is introducing 14 to 20 VizCards, but it plans to keep issuing new batches in an ongoing basis, as often as once a week. These are, like the site, built mobile first – Vizify doesn’t have a mobile app but has been built to adjust to your smartphone screen automatically. And users like what they see: A third of Vizify’s traffic comes from mobile.
But VizCards aren’t just for fun: Silverstein says there are “really nice SEO wrappers around them” that can help bump up your Vizify profile when people search for you. And no one needs to be reminded how important it is to control what pops up when someone searches your name. Luckily, the Vizify profile is rising: Between 30 and 40 percent of users see their Vizify page showing up on the first page, a good amount above LinkedIn and Twitter (Google’s territorial stand off with Twitter and Facebook is likely helping this as well). My own Vizify pops up below my Digital Trends profile and Twitter account – not bad for a site I’ve only been using since July. “We’re doing all the right, white hat things from an SEO standpoint so your profile comes up soon,” says Silverstein.
“Personal and professional, the wall between them has to crumble, because it’s being driven by the people looking for you online,” he says. “They can find your personal stuff, they can find your professional stuff, so we wanted to find a way to bring it all together.”
