startupi

Many people know about MeAdiciona.com, which is a service that lists the profiles of a user in various social networks, including other types of contact info like your telephone number and your profile on web services, something like an online calling card.

Based in Curitiba, it’s produced and maintained by ClickMasters, which offers, among other things, e-commerce solutions. It was founded in 2003 by Diego Sampaio with his own investment.

According to Diego, the idea came to him in 2007, as a bit of a joke. The idea in the beginning was to be a redirect to Orkut. That is, instead of you having to find a person on the social network, you could add the URL to Me Adiciona. But the service evolved into something much bigger.

The service, which has more than 13,000 users, is available only in Portuguese, but in February they will launch an English version (LookMeUp.at) and a Spanish one (AdicionaMe.com). The versions in other languages will use the same profile one already used in Portuguese. For example meadiciona.com/fugita and lookmeup.at/fugita point to the same profile on separate pages.

When I asked Diego about conflicts with search tools in relation to which profile is more important he said they are “more concerned with facilitation the transfer of content between users, that with the divulging of profiles in a search engines, if only because a good portion of users ask for it.” The privacy thanks. This is a delicate question, especially because Me Adiciona permits the publication of telephone numbers.

The preview of the new version shows the possibility of adding contacts - Me Adiciona will be your main social graph, and it could become the most interesting service than a sort of business card on the web. This will allow the setting of privacy depending on the level of relationship between people. It’s also possible there will be a mobile version for smartphones.

According to Diego, Me Adiciona is now closing a contract with a large portal, which could give more structure to both the infrastructure and business.

I believe this service has huge potential. I saw back in 2008 that a lot of people were using Me Adiciona in their email signatures, which is a good sign. We’ll have to keep an eye on new developments!

Note: this post written in collaboration with Gilberto Jr.