In today’s world, it’s not enough to have a Facebook profile. There are many other social apps and platforms where we now spend most of our time interacting with friends, colleagues and family. There are many apps and services that make it so easy to manage most of our accounts on the various social networks we are like posting simultaneously and what not. However, there are not so many such apps and services when it comes to making it easy to get us on those social networks.
If you are to give out a link to one of the social networks you are in which one will it be? A link to your professional profile on LinkedIn? Your personal website? Your Instagram page? Facebook? Twitter?
Honestly, it’s all a mess. It’s this dilemma that sees us somehow use our social media bio pages to paste many links to yet other social media profiles in the hope that anyone who needs to keep up with our affairs online would be able to easily follow the trail.
What if you didn’t have to do all that and you could have just one link to share with everyone that contained all links to your social media (and other) profiles as well as quick contact information like a phone number?
That, in a nutshell, is what One, an app I stumbled upon at the Dubai Internet City stand at the ongoing GITEX Technology Week in Dubai, does.
According to Farid Jumah, the app’s creator and one of the founders of One, their app’s simple mission is to make it less of a pain to share your public information online. From my 2 days of trying out the app, that is what it exactly does.
Signing up is easy. One is presented with an option to sign up using their Facebook account or an email address. Using the former makes it easy to look for and find any friends who may have already signed up for a One ID. Using the latter option means that you are essentially building your One presence from scratch and the only way to add new friends is by searching for them on the app using their username.
Once one has signed up to One, they get a public page tied with their @username, Twitter/Medium style. For instance, my One profile can be found at GoOne.co/@echenze. Something that reminds me of about.me and its premise of a single online identity to rule them all. This public page then displays shortcuts to one’s profiles on the many social platforms they are in be it Skype, SoundCloud, Snapchat or even Foursquare among several others.
I was deeply concerned about having my phone number out in the open since it was needed for the sake of adding my WhatsApp account but my fears were allayed when I found out that such sensitive information (including the date of birth) is hidden from the prying eyes of the public by default until you become friends with someone on One (creating yet another social network?).
One, which launched at the start of the year, is available on both the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store.
