How About A Fast Exit: About.me Gets Acquired By Aol

techcocktail.com

8 points·FrankGruber5··7 comments

Ok, I'm going to say it...

...I don't get it. The product is, IMHO, pretty immature - no surprise seeing as it only just went live a few days ago. Unlike RackSpace buying CloudKick a few days ago, where you could argue it would be hard + long + risky to build in-house, with About.me I really can't see what couldn't have been built by Aol in a short order of time.

Sure they had 400k+ users in the beta (wtf?) and so of course AOL gets to buy users. But 'tens of millions' seems a lot for 400k users.

400K users at the moment, but what's their rate of growth? Maybe it'll be 1m in a few months. Facebook is how you interact with friends, Twitter is SMS, and About.me is how you present yourself to the Internet public at large.

Congrats to my friends Tony and Alex there

Price?

They did not disclose a price but I'm speculating in the ten of millions.

Are you speculating this figure because thats what the TechCrunch article that broke the story said, or do you have alternative sources of information? No disrespect, just wondering.

From his personal bio: "Frank was formerly a product strategist and evangelist for the Aol social networking group, which included such products as AIM" and I'm assuming FrankGruber5 here == @Frankgruber on Twitter who lists "Frankgruber5" as a link to about him.

I'm going to assume insider knowledge :p

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