Claim your profile is live

I am proud to announce a new feature on the site: the ability to claim your profile. As people are contributing to the site, this new feature enables them to link their edits to their own Spoke person pages. In the specific case below, Matt will get two links to its own personal page enabling people interested in his contributions to click on his name and access his personal spoke page.

At this point, the ability to link your page to a page you edited by claiming your profile is only possible when:

1)  You create or edit a page. Right now, in the upper right side of the page, we feature who created the page as well as who edited the page last, giving people incentive to add more content;

2)  You add a video, or a link to the timeline, notable links, or achievements and recognition section.

We tried to make "Claiming your profile" as simple as "following a profile". You get on your profile page and click on "this is me" on the right side. If you want to unlink, you just hover over the same button and click, and it's done.

Personally, I like this feature a lot because it kills two birds with one stone. It reinforces the quality of the links contributed by providing information about who is making the contribution and this also helps contributors to build their reputation on the site. This is our first foray into enabling our contributors to benefit from the pages they are creating. Their personal page becomes the page where they can promote themselves while the pages they are updating with information remain as objective as possible. Claiming your profile is all about the person making the edits, so that others understands who the person is and learn to trust that person’s edits over time.

In order to make this approach a reality, we made several design decisions that you should be aware of:

1)  You cannot claim your profile unless you have registered using either your Linkedin profile or your Facebook profile. If you have already registered, go on the “edit account” page, and link your user account to your social profile(s) from there. This is a safety mechanism that we are using to make sure that people who are claiming a profile are real and representative of who they say they are on the site;

2)  You can only claim one profile. This was a big subject of discussion in the company and this may evolve over time; but we wanted to make sure that you only claim something of value to you and preferably your own profile. We will particularly pay attention of who claims what and we reserve the right to “unclaim” a profile if the profile was claimed inappropriately;

3)  Lastly, you cannot claim a company or a topic. At this point, claiming is all about creating and adding links, and enabling people to understand who is performing these actions. As we develop the site, we will come up with many ways to associate companies and topics to other objects within the site.

 Hopefully, you will appreciate this feature and will learn to benefit from it.

 As usual, please do not hesitate to give feedback at getsatisfaction.com/spoke

 Philippe Cases