ApnaCircle Launches New Profile

We were waiting to see Company Pages coming online the next week but we were in for a surprise this morning when we saw a new profile intimation on our profile page on ApnaCircle. Just as we landed on the profile page, this is what greeted us:

 

This new feature comes in after they launched their corporate site earlier this month. The look of the new profile is really exciting so we dive in for a treat straightaway without any delay :)

We would have liked to capture the full profile look for you, but the page is decently long and enough full and then you should be given a chance to view yours well, right ;). The upper part of the edit mode looks like this:

Nicely assembled with colors that don't pinch the eye so its good to look at. The Preview my profile link shows the read only mode of your profile or as you may guess the same look that is presented to anybody else who looks at your new profile. New tools to edit the profile have been added, as you see on the right there is a Quick editing drop that lets you do all the normal stuff of changing your profile pic, title or description as well as editing to your career graph, we talked about a couple months back. The career visualization has been added in to one of tabs that are just beneath the part that we showed in the above image.

This gives a card like feel to the whole profile with the most required details of a profile displayed on the virtual card as you see in above image. Don't miss out on the last option in the Quick editing drop: Add a link:

You could reference your blog yes but there is one thing new which is the other services that you see in the Add Link drop here. You now can provide links to other services like, YouTube, Flickr and even Quora.

With the Quick editing tools on the left, there is an interesting part on the right. The Share my profile drop allows you to share your profile on ApnaCircle, Facebook, Twitter as well as Google plus. Nice options and nicely laid ;)

And there is a link to your public profile as well. Although strangely its in an editable text box; wonder why! 

And if you think since this is cool and you may want to download your vcard, you got your wish. See that plus drop apart from Share my profile and My Account? Just point to it and you will have an option to download your business card in the vcard format to use. Plus in case you wish to go back to the old profile, there is a link for that too here. But since we love the new look, we won't be putting the screen shot for that here. It was "only so you know".

In case you are viewing someone else' profile who is not in your contact. The Quick editing gets replaced with how you may be linked to that profile, Share my profile makes way for Add to Contact and on the virtual card you will have a link to view that person' business and personal cards (depending on the information shared with you).

There will also be a progress bar to make you aware of your profile completion and suggest you options n how to make it complete:

Each of the 4 tabs Summary, My Background, My Contacts, and My activity on ApnaCircle provides you with more info on your profile. To edit any section just hover the mouse over the section and you will see an edit button to help your cause. Like you see here while we wanted to edit the our skills, sensing our mouse the Edit button showed up to help us.

The bottom of the page shows the visitors to your profile (total of 4 as compared to 3 in the header drop). While at the same place you may see the related profiles if you are in the read only mode or when checking someone else' profile. The right side bar spans up to show your recent activity on the site and interestingly notices your gender as well. This section makes more sense now that the Member viewing someone else' profile would be able to see his/her recent activities including the connections that they have been making and the interactions in the groups. See that there are details on both the groups the Member is part of and the groups that the Member is himself an admin. If the Member has any blogs attached to their profile then it also shows u here as the last item. 

Our Views:

This is a 10/10 update the site has provided its users with. There is so much of a professional look here that its hard to not love it the moment you see it. It seems Viadeo group is going to give LinkedIn a run for their money, and pretty soon as well. It was hard to find any mistakes here but we thought the below ones made sense. 

1. Each of the 4 tabs when clicked should have provided a data view without a page reload
2. In case the profile name is too large, like in our case the star fell off to the second line after we changed the name to test this.
3. The public profile URL in the Share my profile drop, should have been inside a non editable box and should always be public URL even when we are on Viadeo.
4. The profile visits layer at the bottom of the page shows 4 profiles, may do well to let the bar scroll and do a lazy load of the mini profiles as you roll over.
5. If you are viewing someone else' profile who has migrated to new one, use the plus drop on the right of the virtual card look and you will see an option that seems to be in french, although you are in English language??

 

Raj Dubey

Post Credit

Raj works as a Software developer in the ApnaCircle.com IT team that operates from New Delhi. He informed us about this feature on the ApnaCircle portal.
Connect with him either on Facebook or on ApnaCircle for his professional life.