
AOL Acquires Personal Profile Startup About.Me - MichaelApproved
http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/20/aol-acquires-personal-profile-startup-about-me/
======
mmelin
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.

~~~
johnrob
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).

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

~~~
aditya
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!)

~~~
abstractbill
_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.

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

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kleiba
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.

~~~
alnayyir
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.

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uptown
I wasn't convinced of another bubble until now.

~~~
pclark
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.

~~~
talbina
Doesn't matter if AOL is profitable.

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

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

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fabiandesimone
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.

~~~
duck
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.

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

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ig1
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.

~~~
JSig
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.

~~~
jessriedel
> 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.

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

~~~
ig1
How many of your non-technical friends and family use Wordpress ?

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phuff
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..."

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kilian
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!

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jmboling
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?

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c1sc0
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.

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bigbang
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.

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mrich
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.

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thedoctor
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.

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azrealus
I apologize but I think this is BS...

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

That's... incredible.

~~~
citricsquid
If you watch the video they sold before launch.

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chairface
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...](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)

As of this comment, the number is 14,400

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

"Tens of Millions" should denote _something_

~~~
sewerhorse
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

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stevefarnworth
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).

~~~
c1utch
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.

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runevault
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.

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thedoctor
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.

~~~
lian
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.

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

~~~
spindritf
Even the domain is worth more than that.

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

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

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matwiemann
And already account deletion is broken

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

[http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=personal%20brand...](http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=personal%20brand&cmpt=q)

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

~~~
aresant
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.

~~~
ojbyrne
a) hardly

b) agreed

c) cronyism

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

~~~
mediaman
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.

~~~
maxawaytoolong
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.

------
jw84
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.

~~~
l0nwlf
> 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.

~~~
barclay
No, that sounds about right.

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drivebyacct2
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?

