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It's been made clear in several posts that Stack Overflow (and other Stack sites) are not social media sites. This fact, I agree with. I don't believe SO should ever change that. However, I believe we can supplement it more with current social media avenues.

For example, we already allow questions and answers to be shared on sites such as Facebook, Google+, and Twitter. Sharing on social media can be useful for content on the site to be found, shared, and collaborated on besides the usual methods of discovery.

I'd like to take that one step further and allow users to link to social media in their profiles easily, and optionally. Facebook, Twitter, Google+, GitHub, LinkedIn, Stack Careers, etc.

For example: enter image description here

Personally, I would like to have a link back to my LinkedIn, Twitter, and GitHub pages to complete my professional profile here to make sure I'm discoverable outside of the site, if need be.

I do realize that the "About Me" section can be utilized for this function, but I believe it would be easier to use the simple iconic branding people are already familiar with instead of scouring the About Me section to determine if you shared any links to these sites.

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  • 5
    Add careers in there as well..? Aug 21, 2013 at 18:35
  • 2
    In the mean time, we could always place those social images in the about me section using <img> tags and make them clickable by wrapping them in anchor tags, or even markdown links...
    – Lix
    Aug 21, 2013 at 18:38
  • @benisuǝqbackwards Excellent idea. Aug 21, 2013 at 18:40
  • I like it, but I'm going to guess this will be placed near the bottom of an already long priority list (if it's placed at all).
    – JDB
    Aug 21, 2013 at 18:40
  • What's "Git", did you mean "GitHub"? Aug 21, 2013 at 18:41
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    @MadaraUchiha Or i.stack.imgur.com/ghp8g.jpg
    – animuson StaffMod
    Aug 21, 2013 at 18:44
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    This is a Stack Exchange/Social-Media-related proposal I'm not instantly opposed to! Aug 21, 2013 at 19:16
  • One small but distinct advantage this proposal carries over recreating the same links in your "About me" as @Lix suggests: the rel="me" attribute on links, when used reciprocally between two pages, is used to tell Google that two profiles identify the same human person. It is not possible to add rel="me" to a link through any means on SO other than the one "Website" link in the profile (i.e., other uses are sanitized out), but these links could include rel="me".
    – apsillers
    Aug 21, 2013 at 19:36
  • Hoping this is interpreted as objective and not judgmental :) Your links to 'several' 'posts' are all to a Question asking if Stack Exchange is social networking - social networking is just 1 of 13 types of social media - I'm not sure it can be claimed as fact that Stack Exchange is not some type of social media in general, based on that Question you linked to.
    – cellepo
    Apr 14, 2020 at 0:10
  • @benisuǝqbackwards stackoverflow.com/jobs now exists, if that's relevant to your "careers" comment. You might know that by now (7 years later :), but figured worth posting this as your comment has gotten some upvotes.
    – cellepo
    Apr 14, 2020 at 0:34

1 Answer 1

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I'm not sure if these features were added since this Question was last active, but Edit profile and settings [currently] has distinct fields for Github, Twitter (obviously I'm not on there [yet?]), and [just] 1 generic/catch-all field (that's where I put my LinkedIn): enter image description here

(And FWIW, https://stackoverflow.com/jobs also [now] exists).

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