blog.extendr.com

We’ve been diligently working on a redesign of the site and the addition of new features in the last couple months. We’re excited to go live soon.

Thanks for the team over at 37Signals for sharing the results of their test on headlines for High Rise. We’ll be considering a resent post of theirs when we describe our upcoming premium service.

Currently we are thinking something like the following.

30 Day Free Trial on Premium Accounts
As always, standard accounts are free!

What do you think? Is there something to change or add to your mind?

It seems a pressing question these days. At least our google alerts suggests it is. All kinds of people are talking about business cards. John, a.k.a. human3rror, is wondering if bloggers need business cards.

To our minds, cards are just another tool to get a certain task done. When meeting someone we tend to be vastly more intersted in interacting with them on a personal level and learning more about them when they are physically infront of us than we are in remembering the particulars of their address or even name. Think, “now, remember the “e” is before the “i” but no “s” and start with a “p.” Moreover, likely hundreds of distractions will occur before either person gets the chance to “remember” the other’s information and look it up.

So, do bloggers need business cards? We don’t know. It seems if bloggers want to increase the chances of being remembered and having people come interact with their content, business cards (in this case maybe you’d call them personal cards because maybe you don’t yet do business with your blog) might be a helpful tool.

.extendr.com might make your cards more simple by empowering you to print one address on the card that simply presents your links in one place. .extendr.com helps you say, “Hello. Here is where I am online.” In this way you can include more than one (or a few) links to your web footprint.  Further, you can edit or add to the content of your page at any time without the needs to reprint your cards. We think that’s a powerfull idea.

John, thanks for the post.

So, Yes, Joseph is reading from notes in this video but what do you think of the content and pitch. Next time he’ll stand up and act like he doesn’t have notes.

View it here

“It is a powerful act to name something.  It is powerful to be emancipated from the bonds of imposed language.  It is an act of liberation to find one’s own words and one’s own names” – Clemens Sedmak

Liberate your personal brand online.   http://www.extendr.com

Today, Bud Bilanich, the common sense guy, included us in his blog post regarding “positive personal impact.” Bud, we’re glad you’ve seen us to be fit to include and think we can be helpful. Thanks for the kind words.

Stop by and check him out on his site or his .extendr page.

We thought we’d invite you into the office by pre-releasing our press release in a draft form. Many of you likely have more skill in press releases than we do. Regardless of your press release acumen, we look forward to hearing your thoughts.

–

.extendr.com was started to solve a difficult problem with a simple solution. Joseph noticed that in our online presence we tend to make very poor introductions to our personal brand. We’ve got several email addresses (work and home), several media pages (Facebook, MySpace, a blog, etc.), but they’re typically scattered and disconnected.  How do we bring all that together into a single identity? Joseph approached Neil, a college friend & master coding ninja, about building a web service together and .extendr.com was born.

.extendr.com’s primary function is to aid you in gathering all of your online presence (e.g. social networks, micro-sites, etc.), organize and present them in one place.  It works a bit like a personal homepage, an easy storage space for your interests (links), contact info (email), blogs, and social media pages (Facebook, MySpace).

Having an .extendr.com page allows for simple introductions to your entire personal brand, consolidation of your complete web footprint, & a true extension of you in the online world.

Interaction on the web is like a continuous cocktail party where you’re meeting new people everytime you go to the bar for another drink. There’s just one major difference. At a real cocktail party, when someone approaches you pause the conversation, politely introduce yourself and invite them into your conversation. Why do we act so different online? Online we keep on with our conversation without a well-formed, coherent introduction. Online we’re pretty good with interaction but rather poor with introduction.

How do you introduce yourself, your personal brand, online?  Who are you?  What are you about?  Where do you come from?  What do you like?  What do you care about?  What is the “essence” of you?  At .extendr.com we provide a solution that empowers you to make a positive and powerful introduction online by consolidating your links, email, and social media pages in one place. This way your new connection doesn’t have to rely on Google to find your online identity–and Google’s impersonal formula isn’t in charge of your personal brand.  Lets face it, we don’t have time to google everyone we wave to online. We need to streamline the way we introduce ourselves and say hello.

.extendr.com offers a simple thing, Your links, one place.™ The address doesn’t change but the content can.

Now you can be at ease about printing your introduction web address on your business card, use it as your twitter link or in your social profiles, and put it in your email signatures.

Don’t just wave, Say Hello!

At one point I was a window washer. When I was looking for a different gig and trying to make the best impression of myself. I would meet people in person and be able to control and package the information they received. However, when I met people online or left my card with them I had no idea what would be the best link to give them. I was continually wondering what they would find of me online. Moreover, I could not game google enough to get the links I wanted on the main page of my search results.

So, I decided to take matters into my own hands. I built a site full of the things I wished google would find of me. I tossed a little personal brand texture in, and stuck it up on one url. When I started sharing that one place that included my picture and video links right along with my company and personal websites I got huge feedback. Both traffic and positive words about the concept were sent my way. That’s when I thought maybe I had something to build as a service so others could do the same.

I approached Neil, a friend from those formative college years, with the idea and he agreed to be the developer ninja on the project. .extendr.com was born.

Since then we’ve been developing a tool to help people do more than wave at each other online. Our goal is to help people say, “Hello” in a way that makes a great introduction.

We’re happy to welcome you along for the ride. — Joseph

We recently added a feature with a bit of a technical name that will help users add pages to their profile with much more ease than the previous manual way. Technically, it’s called a bookmarklet. We’ll refer to it as our “Quick Add” feature.

All users now have a link at the top of their “/edit_profile” page that can be made a bookmark in their browser. Call it what you like but consider keeping it in view on your browser window instead of hiding it way way down a list. This will be a helpful little button. When you’re out surfing and you want to add something to your .extendr.com page just click the bookmark button while on the desired page. We’ll do the hard work of capturing the address, naming it and adding it to your profile in a new catagory called “added from web” all with the magic of some javascript and other goodness.

For you though, remember, you click once. Just once for all those steps. That’s why we call it “Quick Add.” Then you can login and switch stuff around as you like.

We hope you like it. We hope it helps. Cheers.

Our email feature is advanced. It doesn’t matter that you call your email links in .extendr.com because when an email link is clicked a light box loads with an email form in it. This adds security from bots looking to add your address to spam lists and it offers you the flexibility to respond to whatever email comes in with the appropriate address for that particular correspondence.

If you have your email links named with your email address consider changing it. We hope this helps you simultaneously hide from bots but be more accessible to real people.