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.
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.
Ev Williams' Zerply Profile: http://www.zerply.com/profile/ev
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.
The Zerply Contacts List/Address Book
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/.