Hacker News Reader

Comment by jbail | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

Conrad's company previous to About.me, Sphere, was purchased by AOL in 2008:

http://techcrunch.com/2008/04/14/aol-buys-sphere-content-eng...

And Tony stayed at AOL for something close to two years.

The concept was already "proven" by Flavors.me. About.me was a better domain name, and better marketed.

Flavors.me ended up being acquired by Moo.com though. I don't think they ever got "huge"

In terms of just a personal page, you're right there many alternatives, but About.me brings its domain to the table. That's really the entire value of the company if you think about it. It's just the domain + mini-CMS for quick personal pages.

Plus, I imagine, it couldn't hurt to have a simple profile page linked somewhere.

> In the end, what About.me brings to the table is pretty boring.

I don't agree. If you start to think about what could disrupt LinkedIn, you realize that there's a good chance it could look like About.me. I bet in 12 months, About.me will find some direct competitors. This is a big opportunity IMO.

"So and so has endorsed you for XML and Microsoft Office!"

Every time I get one of these emails I come a little bit closer to closing my LinkedIn account. A LinkedIn replacement in the form of about.me sounds pretty appealing right now.

There's something similar (with less dumb endorsements?) in zerply.com.

Apparently if you try to tag a skill with "C#" it shows you an error that you can't even identify as an error

http://i.imgur.com/M1UwlnH.png

upon DOM inspection it says "A Tag can consist of letters A-Z, plus, space, underscores, hash or dashes."

That aside it's a very slick website

edit: apparently you also can't edit an experience name. It looks like it changes when you save but when you refresh it it goes back to what it was before.

Perhaps the VCs are investing in Conrad, not About.me as it exists today. I can't imagine a vanity site like About.me's current incarnation having a whole lot value; but perhaps it will get engineered into some sort of social aggregator or identity management service.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com