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.
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.
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.
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!)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.