AOL Acquires Personal Profile Startup About.Me | Hacker News Reader

AOL Acquires Personal Profile Startup About.Me

techcrunch.com

Seriously? 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.

"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

I agree. In all fairness it is in people's nature to buy from their friends even if it doesn't always make sense.

I 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.

How many people also got different variations of their name?

I reserved my regular handle but never returned to set up my page.

The 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.

Techcrunch always guesses that price. I wouldn't put a lot of stock in it.

What 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.

Keep 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).

Why exactly? Because of their ability to copy another existing site? http://flavors.me

Or, 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!)

Or, 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.

Or like self-fulfilling prophecy.. Thanks HN, first a post on multilingual Quines, then this line.. My head spins now.. :)

sell 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.

Actually mentioning digg just reinforces my point - there's relationships and then there's cronyism. Because digg did get money to some investors - presumably the same ones who got invited to the right parties.

And invariably we'll have to listen to various people from this company blovating about how smart, and creative, and witty they are.

To expand on your joke, the ability to generate buzz on the twittersphere.

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).

Yeah, let's be pretty clear: even if you built about.me, you weren't going to have an exit as good as this one because you weren't already a known quantity to AOL (as Tony Conrad was).

I will also say that flavors.me launched before them, but the about.me domain is obviously much better than flavors.

So this is essentially a signing bonus for Tony Conrad to come back to AOL for a few more years? Man, I need to start working on my personal branding.

Some part of this signing amount is for domain name. about.me is valuable domain to have IMO.

That would be "acquiring back a founding team that'd already cashed out to AOL once".

I wonder how many times you get to do that.

(And I guess this sale is why all my "in the loop" friends al started metioning their about.me page a few weeks back. Yeah, it worked, I became one of the acquired users @ about.me/Iain_Chalmers )

True. 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.

First 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.

Deleted comment

I think you have your math wrong there by quite a lot. It's $50, not $50,000!

000 != 0?

Thanks for the catch. I'm deleting the original.

Before I read the article, I was thinking talent acquisition... now... I don't know what to make of it.

Sensationalism perhaps?

Talent 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.

So I guess a successful team at Google should group quit, create a social me to product then wait to be acquired for a few years bonus salary for all by either Google or another of the big players.

That's a bit like what etherpad did, right? :)

how 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.

This 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.

So 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.

I wasn't convinced of another bubble until now.

a 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.

Doesn't matter if AOL is profitable.

Is about.me profitable? What's the revenue, if any?

Why does that matter? It only launched 4 days ago.

It's the never-ending AOL bubble. Remember when they acquired Bebo for 800 million dollars?

I was just thinking the same thing.

Have you seen the "introductory profiles"?

http://about.me/ryanchris

http://about.me/philblack

http://about.me/nathanfitzsimmons

http://about.me/pascal

http://about.me/juliaallison

http://about.me/tonyconrad

It looks like they "sold" About.me even before they even started building it.

What 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.

The typeface on Conrad's page is pretty fucked up on Linux (CR-48)

They all look...so...pretentious.

What do you mean? That's the product...

No-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.

If 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.

> 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.

What about projects like chi.mp that give a personal page around a domain name in just as simple of an interface?

Trouble? I know that Wordpress.com and google make it extremely easy for a non-technical person to get going with a domain name.

How many of your non-technical friends and family use Wordpress ?

Google Profiles has a fairly large base of users, mostly due to people coming to it via things like Blogger, Picasa, and Buzz.

about.me/whatever is a nicer URL scheme than google.com/profiles/whatever, though.

Sounds 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..."

Look, 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!

About.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?

I 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.

It 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.

Welcome 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.

How 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.

I apologize but I think this is BS...

They released to the public 4 -DAYS- ago?!

That's... incredible.

If you watch the video they sold before launch.

I 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...

As of this comment, the number is 14,400

Could anyone explain to me just how About.Me plans on ever making money?

"Tens of Millions" should denote something

Slap 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

They already sell a service....

How is this up voted? It is answered.

They'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).

a) 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.

I'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.

Apple 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.

You 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.

I would've paid exactly $150 USD to acquire this. There's nothing there!

Even the domain is worth more than that.

oh yeah, i forgot aol still was alive and well. :-/

"You've got mail" bahaha so laughable 15 years later.

And already account deletion is broken

Simplicity, well executed in front of growing demand for personal brand support.

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.

Since they just copied another company, it probably was easy. http://flavors.me/

Everything 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.

a) hardly

b) agreed

c) cronyism

d) flavors.me probably started simpler, and added more features to try and get more traction.

If 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.

The infuriating thing about cronyism and nepotism in Silicon Valley is that nobody is allowed to call a spade a spade.

It's always a talent acquisition.

Where your talent is that you already know the guy heading M&A.

c) Hahah - great response and true! But it's engineered cronyism which in and of itself is brilliant.

What 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.

> Aside from their content publishing offerings almost every one of their product offerings is fourth class, or third at best.

You forgot the fact that MapQuest too is an AOL product.

No, that sounds about right.

Is 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?

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Purposely being glib loses its humor amongst nerds that live and breathe internet business. Try another schtick.

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