14 DAY TRIAL // AOL has made a string of small acquisitions this year and it's continuing with buying About.me a site which enables users to set up an unified profile page for themselves. The company is just a few months old and the service just went out of beta and gone live for four days when AOL acquired it.
"about.me is more than just the aggregation of social profiles, it allows people to easily express themselves in an increasingly noisy environment full of disparate social experiences," Brad Garlinghouse, President of Consumer Applications at AOL, said.
"Creating smart online identities for consumers can have an incredibly positive impact on AOL’s content and advertising strategy," he added.
About.me enables users to create a highly customized profile page. Of course, with Facebook, Twitter, blogs and countless other ways of creating an online profile, it may seem that there is no room left for a startup dedicated to solely that.
However, About.me came about to combat precisely the number of options out there. About.me links to your existing profiles, including Linkedin, Twitter, email, blogs and many others, and provides ample customization options to create a highly personalized page.
AOL believes that access to all the profile information would provide valuable data to the company and would enable it to better know its users. The financial details of the deal have not been disclosed, but the company has raised just $425.000 to date.
About.me has been quite popular so far. A closed beta period got them 400,000 users and the site has been adding more since it went live for everyone.
"Aol is doing what great, sustainable business do every so often – they’re reinventing themselves. As the business model of the oldest and one of the most venerable Internet businesses evolves, about.me becomes an important piece of their strategy to reach across and engage the web," Tony Conrad, About.me cofounder, wrote.