About.me Buys Itself Back from AOL (opens in new tab)

It was curious when AOL bought About.me four days after About.me launched. 4 days. That's insanely fast. Tony Conrad must have friends at AOL.

What's curious is buying the company back. Maybe Conrad is returning a favor?

In the end, what About.me brings to the table is pretty boring. You want a personal site? There are 10,000 ways to do that. I don't see the value in it personally...and maybe AOL doesn't either, but the host of VC's lining up for About.me's $5.7 million financing round must.

So who here uses about.me?

> “People shouldn’t leave it to Google to define who they are based on an algorithm,” Mr. Conrad said, adding that there is not one place that defines a person’s identity online.

I know this is just marketing speak, but it is still deliciously ironic...Isn't about.me's success dependent on Google rewarding it for its SEO friendly title,h1 tags and short links?

I still respect Conrad for making the initial sale (supposedly) for the benefit of his team, who, unlike Conrad himself, hadn't experienced a startup exit yet.

Anyone interested what we had to say when it was purchased in the first place:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2025764

Still, bubble's been going a while now hasn't it! I think this was when a lot of people here started saying 'bubble!'. Me included. If it's a bubble, it's becoming a big old one.

What do you guys think about using about.me as a personal business card? My personal homepage design is getting really long in the tooth and don't really have time for at redesign.

Would you prefer the about page at about.me or using your own domain and design?

From the co-founder quotation in the article: "There’s no obvious leverage in being part of the AOL media network, and there’s no synergy and integration." That's the rub. AOL used to have more "network effects" than everyone else in the online business, and that didn't help them figure out how to provide value for their business partners. My prediction for Facebook corresponds to this: "Facebook will go the way of AOL, still being a factor in the industry years from now, but also serving as an example of a company that could never monetize up to the level of the hype surrounding it." Gathering millions of pairs of eyeballs is a wonderful achievement, but helping business partners for your network find value by how they are able to reach users through your network is even more wonderful.

AFTER EDIT: The submission of the story here did more to prompt me to interact with About.me than anything I've done on an AOL property in the last two years, so I guess it is a good move for About.me to go independent again.

I think About.me should go after the work networking space in some manner that gets them out of the 'personal page' business. It's a huge space that LinkedIn isn't going to own all of. Just like there's room for Pinterest and Twitter (among others) along with Facebook, there's room for other large LinkedIn variations.

I find About.me interesting. It strikes the right balance of being easy to use, useful, and providing value. I certainly could build my own similar profile page, but it would not be nearly as simple. And it's something of a social network, one I could actually see paying (a small fee) for.

As opposed to, say, App.net.

just want to mention that flavors.me, stared by a former Vimeo employee, does the same thing as about.me, has been around longer, and has a better UX. I'm not getting paid, I just like the service and get annoyed when it's not acknowledged as an obvious competitior to about.me

Not the first time this has happened!

Fleaflicker sold to AOL April 2008, bought back July 2011.

Congratulations to Tony, he's managed to follow one of those rare startup journeys and buy-back his start-up at a profit, and escape the fate that Brizzly encountered.