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AOL Acquires Personal Profile Startup About.Me
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- jw84 16y agoPurposely being glib loses its humor amongst nerds that live and breathe internet business. Try another schtick.
- mmelin 16y agoSeriously? Acquired for "tens of millions of dollars", half a million dollars in funding? I'm not usually the one to ask things like this but could someone please explain what they're buying here? 400k users signed up during beta, okay, but for a service like this I don't see how that translates to these kinds of numbers. If they have data that tells them they can convert a meaningful percentage of users to a premium plan, sure, but somehow I doubt that's AOL's plan.
- wyclif 16y agoWhat problem does About.me solve? Seriously, I want to know. Wasn't Google Profiles supposed to be for this use case? I'm not sure why the tech public needs a bunch of fragmented personal identity domains.
- ronnier 16y ago"Vanity acquisitions do serve one purpose: wealth redistribution. Take money from public companies (bye 401k!) and give it to a lottery few" -dhh http://twitter.com/#!/dhh/status/15547006609006592 http://twitter.com/#!/dhh/status/15547006609006592
- rokhayakebe 16y agoI agree. In all fairness it is in people's nature to buy from their friends even if it doesn't always make sense.
- aditya 16y agoTalent acquisition? Tony's a seasoned entrepreneur and he built a pretty good team, that's worth the price. EDIT: Also, if 20mm AOL users now have an about.me profile that can become a huge part of AOL's push into social, that would be worth it too.
- johnrob 16y agoKeep in mind, a founding team like that is probably worth 10s of millions to a company like AOL (assuming they retain them for several years).
- ojbyrne 16y agoWhy exactly? Because of their ability to copy another existing site? http://flavors.me http://flavors.me
- aditya 16y agoOr, because of their ability to copy another existing site, and having the business savvy and relationships to sell it for a huge sum. Having a successful startup is a lot more than the tech behind it or the product itself, right? I mean, you should know, considering Digg never returned money to its investors. (joke!)
- benatkin 16y agoTo expand on your joke, the ability to generate buzz on the twittersphere. http://tweetreach.com/reach?q=aboutme http://tweetreach.com/reach?q=aboutme The last 50 tweets alone (at the time I submitted the form) reached 275,244 people! (Well, could have, if everyone read every tweet in their friends_timeline).
- abstractbill 16y agoOr, because of their ability to ... sell it for a huge sum. Wait, so the founding team is worth a lot because of their ability to sell themselves? Sounds like rather circular reasoning.
- kareemm 16y agosell themselves and "sell" their product (to 400k users) in exchange for time and attention. as the GP suggests, startups are about a lot more than tech - selling, it turns out, is also valuable.
- harscoat 16y agoTrue. But when you see how much fun they have at the end of the video, you may also want, one day, to belong to that "I've been acquired/I IPOed" group.
- staunch 16y agoThe full quote is "The size of the acquisition isn’t being disclosed but our guess is it’s in the tens of millions of dollars." The only thing separating this from crazy and smart is the price, so I think it's important to keep in mind that we don't know the price.
- joshu 16y agoTechcrunch always guesses that price. I wouldn't put a lot of stock in it.
- citricsquid 16y agoI doubt most of those 400k users ever intend on using it. Being an "early adopter" is such a hip and happening thing to be people sign up to new services just to secure a cool sign up date and name now. I have an account with about.me only because I got my first name... I have no intention of ever using it unless it becomes big and worth while.
- MichaelApproved 16y agoHow many people also got different variations of their name?
- tim_iles 16y agoI reserved my regular handle but never returned to set up my page.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- citricsquid 16y agoI think you have your math wrong there by quite a lot. It's $50, not $50,000!
- MichaelApproved 16y ago000 != 0? Thanks for the catch. I'm deleting the original.
- kmfrk 16y agoFirst of all, the 400k is a number, not a metric. Techcrunch only mentions it to create a polite segue to their skepticism. Bear in mind that the number of users is particularly useless, because about.me is an vanity URL-based service. People stampede to reserve a /<firstname> domain. This is also the case for Twitter, Tumblr, and the Facebook vanity URL, or whatever they call it.
- ashchristopher 16y agoBefore I read the article, I was thinking talent acquisition... now... I don't know what to make of it. Sensationalism perhaps?
- thewordpainter 16y agohow much of the acquisition was driven from a talent acquisition standpoint? with his track record, i'm assuming tony conrad had recruited a stellar cast of characters to bring about.me to life.
- jw84 16y agoWhat everyone is essentially fighting over is scraps left behind by Facebook so this makes perfect sense. AOL went sideways when internet users grew up and left their walled gardens, messed up again with MySpace what with the lukewarm response of AIM Pages back in 2006. Now Aol is spending cash on trinkets to pretend they can still worm their way into the center of a non-competent user's internet life. Aside from their content publishing offerings almost every one of their product offerings is fourth class, or third at best. But damn, are they ever good at producing nuggets of content to slap ad relevance algorithms against. They're in a hard position though, what can you do with millions in users and billions in cash in 6, 9, 12 months time to still stay relevant and competent in a post-Zuckerberg Man of the Year world? No, you can't hire a hit. You can only appease shareholders with churn. I'm going to predict the future: In 3 months time everyone in an AOL/Aol database gets sent an email telling them to plug in feeds from other more successful web services. In 6 months time people forget this because behavior can't be modified. In 12 months time a social media consultant will still try to convince you their about.me page is worth putting on business cards. But by then we would be onto the new shiny.
- uptown 16y agoI wasn't convinced of another bubble until now.
- MichaelBosch 16y agoI was just thinking the same thing.
- pclark 16y agoa bubble of what? AOL, a profitable public company, acquired a private company. The private company had employees and investors. Both of whom presumably got a tidy return on their time/money. Pretty much the worst thing that can happen is the acquisition flunks, in which case it's cost AOL "tens of millions" - AOL is a profitable billion dollar company. If the acquisition fails, well, acquisitions are risks - some succeed and others fail.
- Raphael 16y agoIt's the never-ending AOL bubble. Remember when they acquired Bebo for 800 million dollars?
- phuff 16y agoSounds like exactly the kind of purchase a company like AOL would make. It's a high visibility addition to their portfolio of eclectic randomness. Which makes money. "Who knew they'd end up savvy?" is my only response... Oh and I suppose, "Yahoo was on this trajectory a few years back. I wonder if AOL will end up in the same place or if they'll keep their savvy..."
- ig1 16y agoNo-one own the public personal page space. Facebook, et al are about sharing with your friends and not the wider world. Linkedin comes the closest, but it's purely professional, pointing someone to your linkedin will only give them a limited view of yourself. Being your own brand is an important socially as it is professionally. So it makes sense that people are going after this market.
- JSig 16y agoIf being your own brand is so important than why not just get your own domain name. Also, these profiles on about.me seem to just provide short bio with some links to twitter, flickr, facebook, linked, etc... You could do just do this directly on your tumblr, posterous, linkedin etc.. page. Someone posted a link today to the PG essay on stuff. The site about.me makes me realize that maybe sometimes people collect too much virtual stuff. About.me seems to be just more social clutter in the tangled spider-web of a user's online profile. I don't see how about.me adds more value.
- jessriedel 16y ago> If being your own brand is so important than why not just get your own domain name. 99.9% of people cannot or will not deal with that trouble.
- fabiandesimone 16y agoHave you seen the "introductory profiles"? http://about.me/ryanchris http://about.me/ryanchris http://about.me/philblack http://about.me/philblack http://about.me/nathanfitzsimmons http://about.me/nathanfitzsimmons http://about.me/pascal http://about.me/pascal http://about.me/juliaallison http://about.me/juliaallison http://about.me/tonyconrad http://about.me/tonyconrad It looks like they "sold" About.me even before they even started building it.
- maukdaddy 16y agoThey all look...so...pretentious.
- citricsquid 16y agoWhat do you mean? That's the product...
- duck 16y agoWhat is funny is when you Google these people either all of their other sites show up first or their about.me page doesn't even make it in the top 10. The only exception is Tony.
- alnayyir 16y agoThe typeface on Conrad's page is pretty fucked up on Linux (CR-48)
- runevault 16y agoI'm curious of Arrington has a source on that figure. 10s of millions seems insane for a new service that, from the outside looking in, seems easy to replicate, other than the domain name... If someone can explain why it's worth even millions at this moment, I'd love to hear it.
- thedoctor 16y agoApple could do something like this in a heartbeat with me.com, but about.me is likely to be device- and network-agnostic, i.e. you won't need to own an Apple product.
- lian 16y agoYou don't need to own an Apple product to use MobileMe, it is device agnostic. But you do need to give Apple money for the service itself.
- veb 16y agoThey released to the public 4 -DAYS- ago?! That's... incredible.
- citricsquid 16y agoIf you watch the video they sold before launch.
- azrealus 16y agoI apologize but I think this is BS...
- aresant 16y agoSimplicity, well executed in front of growing demand for personal brand support. http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=personal%20brand&cmpt=q http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=personal%20brand... Vanity enough to attract influencers who I bet had their pages pre-built for them by the About.me staff to get them looking that shiny. Tony Conrad makes this look easy.
- ojbyrne 16y agoSince they just copied another company, it probably was easy. http://flavors.me/ http://flavors.me/
- aresant 16y agoEverything is a copy of something. And beyond being a similar product: a) About.me's visual style is stronger than flavors b) Their domain is better and landing page more straightforward c) They got traction by recruiting influential people to their advisory group who spread the word d) They wisely cut the fat, made it ultra simple which makes this easily adoptable - enter your name, upload a photo, connect some links and you're done.
- ojbyrne 16y agoa) hardly b) agreed c) cronyism d) flavors.me probably started simpler, and added more features to try and get more traction.
- aresant 16y agoc) Hahah - great response and true! But it's engineered cronyism which in and of itself is brilliant.
- mediaman 16y agoIf you want to call it cronyism, fine -- but if you want to be successful in business, learning to give yourself an advantage by creating influence with opinion leaders is an important part of becoming recognized and trusted. Those who refuse to do it out of some sort of misguided morality mission typically can be found on the sidelines crying foul at the players making the big wins. Building a good product is not the only part of being a successful entrepreneur. It's not even always the most important part, depending on the market and the entrepreneur, though it always helps, and is often necessary.
- kilian 16y agoLook, I'm the first to register my name on services like that, mostly because I'm a vain nerd, but then I forget about them and never visit them again. I completely fail to see any value in these kind of sites other than making sure someone else doesn't "steal" my name. Still, Congrats to them!
- MichaelBosch 16y agoI would've paid exactly $150 USD to acquire this. There's nothing there!
- spindritf 16y agoEven the domain is worth more than that.
- drivebyacct2 16y agoIs anyone buying social networking companies for the platform these days, or just for flashy names and large numbers of users signing up in large beta windows?
- kleiba 16y agoThis is exactly the reason why I shouldn't become an enterpreneur: apparently my reality distortion field is totally incompatible with everybody else's. If somebody had walked through my door a couple of months ago and told me: "Here's this new company, they let you create "your personal splash page" on the web. Would you like to invest?", I probably would have laughed them out of my office.
- alnayyir 16y agoSo approach entrepreneurship differently. I am aiming to build businesses, sources of revenue and value. You can do like 37signals and provide a service that you can eventually build upon to make a team capable of building a product. Just build something, you don't have to participate in Valley insanity.
- mrich 16y agoWelcome to the dotcom bubble 2.0. Why is techcrunch surprised they sold this early? It doesn't get better than this, lots of early adopters of course but after that it will become moot (sure it's great if about.me/mike is your URL but for the next 10 million mikes it sucks). They will be irrelevant before they are relevant.
- matwiemann 16y agoAnd already account deletion is broken
- kloncks 16y agoCould anyone explain to me just how About.Me plans on ever making money? "Tens of Millions" should denote something
- mrtron 16y agoThey already sell a service.... How is this up voted? It is answered.
- sewerhorse 16y agoSlap a banner on the user page and make the user pay to have it removed Add new features/style options and make the users upgrade to premium accounts to be able to use them
- stevefarnworth 16y agoThey're getting: a) the founding team, b) a "vanity" acquisition which looks good to shareholders and c) the beginnings of a new social graph - imagine pairing their great content stable with a stack of new social hooks. Makes sense now that it's been acquired. It was always a FNAC (feature, not a company).
- c1utch 16y agoa) people who previously worked at AOL b) Shareholders will be upset with such a pointless acquisition c) about.me is a fancy URL shortener that redirects to social graphs, nothing more.
- thedoctor 16y agoHow many people were curious enough to sign up today? I think that speaks to how compelling the concept is. Of course, it also has a lot to do with the desire to name squat to protect your brand. Personally, I signed up but may never use the service. But I don't want someone else using my name as their handle.
- bigbang 16y agoIt saddens me to read stories like this(maybe I'm just jealous). There are lot of entrepreneurs that make sacrifices to make a much better product who would probably love to sell off for a fraction of the amount, yet they fail. Someone with the right connections sells the company for a lot of money(especially when the product is nothing close to ground breaking) even before it launches.
- c1sc0 16y agoI wonder how the reactions would have been if someone 'cool' instead of AOL had bought about.me. My guess is that a big part of the online rage is because of the "Beauty and the Beast" character of this marriage. s/AOL/Google/ and the reactions might have been different. About.me had great potential as a universal businesscard of sorts, the stats were neat & they had a lot of street cred. But I guess that's all over now they lost their cool kid status. Oh well, at least they didn't get acquired by Yahoo. That would have been interesting.
- jmboling 16y agoAbout.me's stereotypical journey through the hypemachine complete with mysterious codename (PumpkinHead) & oddly well-timed endorsements by tech world all-stars all culminating in a sale to AOL only 4 days after launch feels very slimey and speculative to me. The fact that AOL shelled out amigo-money for what is -- let's be honest here -- the social networking equivalent of bench ads for real estate agents is beyond me, but all of these complaints distract from the biggest glaring annoyance of this whole thing... Why on earth do I need ANOTHER profile page?
- JCTony 16y agooh yeah, i forgot aol still was alive and well. :-/ "You've got mail" bahaha so laughable 15 years later.
- chairface 16y agoI am a little late to the party here, but Google says they have FAR fewer than 400,000 pages: http://www.google.com/#sclient=psy&hl=en&safe=off&site=&source=hp&q=site:about.me&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=&pbx=1&fp=1bde53b2ade8e603 http://www.google.com/#sclient=psy&hl=en&safe=off... As of this comment, the number is 14,400