AOL wants to be a cool content company. It recently purchased TechCrunch and Unblab, and today announced its newest acquisition: About.me, a site that lets users create a single, non-interactive profile page that serves as a Web introduction to who they are. The pages usually contain a name, paragraph about the person, links to social networks and services, email, and that’s about it. The company also provides some decent analytics about the behavior of those who visit your profile.
“We founded about.me so that any of us could quickly build a personal and dynamic splash page that points visitors to your content around the web (Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr and Twitter) – be it for personal use, or to create a professional on-line profile,” says co-founder Tony Conrad. “About.me is one of those ‘duh, why hasn’t someone done that?’ type of ideas.”
“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,” said Brad Garlinghouse, president of consumer applications for AOL. “Creating smart online identities for consumers can have an incredibly positive impact on AOL’s content and advertising strategy as it gives us the ability to provide relevant and meaningful content to consumers. The team at about.me has built an incredibly compelling product and we look forward to having them join the team.”
It is still unclear how AOL plans to integrate about.me into its expanding portfolio, which mostly includes blogs and news sites, or how much it paid for the site. About.me began its beta in September and has already managed to wrangle up 400,000 users. It officially launched just four days ago.
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