I have discussed social splash pages or online business cards here in the studio on prior occasions, discussing Flavors.me and DooID, and setting up a page over at About.me as well. My sense of it is “Why not?”, particularly if you are online for networking purposes – these sites offer free hubs to your other social hangouts and help others get to you.

Another relatively recent player in this genre of online apps is Zerply. I was tipped off to it by this recent post by Louis Gray. Where Flavors.me, DooID and About.me are all about the personalized backgrounds and catchy visuals, Zerply looks to be more business-like in its approach, offering templated backgrounds against which you can flash your experience and social connects. Another nice feature is the ability to pull your professional information straight out of Facebook or LinkedIn so there is no need to recreate the wheel here. People visiting your site can learn about you, download your vCard or travel on to your other social haunts – Zerply includes all the major soc net players.

Zerply clearly isn’t the only player in this field, as I note above. Furthermore, Google and LinkedIn and even Facebook offer the ability to create a professional landing page with your background and social links and it would take a lot for a small startup to dislodge these big players. However, my take on these pages is that it never hurts to add your profile wherever you can find a home for it and Zerply certainly offers an easy to build, smart-looking page and another hub for your on-line empire.

Beta now, invite only, but you can request an invite at their URL above.