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AboutUs.org gets $1 million funding - excuse me?
Written by Allen Stern - November 14, 2006
Updated 11/30: Please check out our interview with Ray King
Portland Business Journal reported on November 10th on AboutUs.org receiving $1 million in financing.
So the really basic idea is that AboutUs.org will have 300 million web pages, one on each active domain name. Before I jump into my comments, here are a couple excerpts from the release:
The site name refers to the "About Us" page that commonly appears on business Web sites.
What has AboutUs investors excited is how much attention the site is already getting from Internet users, without any marketing or publicity.
Levin, president of Genesis Financial Solutions Inc. and an active angel investor, said his reason for investing "boils down to two words: Ray King."
I am not going to talk about the funding information, you can read the post on TechCrunch for that. It appears someone from the TC team got right in there and edited their page. Which is great, it looks really good, what happens when some a-hole edits it to make TC look bad? There is no "lock" on the page. So today's work goes for naught.
What I am going to address is bad information. Let's take a look at one of my sites, HTMLCenter.com. Here is what AboutUs shows for the "Related Sites" - I know he is pulling this information from Alexa partially but let's have a look....
So, what in the blue hell does "Human-Touch-Massage.de" have to do with my HTML web site? What about RedStart.com, MortenRasmussen.net and many of hte others. I mean are you kidding me? You publish information about my site that is clearly not accurate nor correct.
What "Ray King" has forced me to do is make me edit this page. How many of the 300 million know how to do this? How many others are wrong? Instead of allowing me to opt-in, they are forcing me to edit or opt-out. Lame. I don't know who in the hell Ray King is, and frankly don't care.
Spammer heaven
And now, let's get to an even bigger issue - when will the spammers hit this site and flood every freakin page with horsecrap? I am betting 90-120 days. A spammer could easily make a mess of this site. Three hundred million backlinks - yeap, I am sure they will be there soon Ray... you ready?
I hate getting mad, but this one just makes me mad. They don't ask my permission to include me, force me to opt-out or edit my page, and even worse, I must keep check on this page all the time to make sure some hater has not made changes to make my sites look bad. I just don't get how people gave this guy money. Maybe I am in the wrong business.
How to Fix
So that I am not all negative, here is how "Ray King" can fix this site. Lock every page. Only allow someone who confirms their email from the domain they want to edit. Then at a minimum we have some way to block unwanted changes. While this is only a tiny step, it would at least help me to lower my blood pressure.
To me, AboutUs.org is just a site that really adds no value other than to get massive page counts and flood Google so that someone looking for the "about us page on htmlcenter" will find their site instead. I would welcome a chance to chat with "Ray King" about this site.
COMMENTS - Add New Comment
Hello Allen,
I understand your concerns and am happy to chat, let's set a time - Ray.
ray@aboutus.org
503.888.8808
Hey Ray! Tell us a little bit about how you got funding. ;)
I also personally cannot see a need, nor want for such a service - and the funding adds to my baffled opinion on AboutUs. The point you make, Allen, are justified in my opinion and were ones I hadn't considered.
Web 2.0 gets stranger by the day - I desperately try to ignore my thoughts that include the word "bubble" - but it's getting harder and harder. I love the creativity and promotion of the individual in 2.0 so much that it scares me to compare this kind of venture to pet sites from 2.0, but it must be done.
Fun while it lasted.
Cheers to that! Awesome review.
I edited the TechCrunch page on AboutUs only to ad that I am the handsomest man in the world and that our research stud Nick Gonzales has a fetish for Gnomes. Both of those changes were removed within hours! I demand some serious reconsideration!
where is the money and development going to head into and whats planned with this site for the future? i don't think it#s an overly horrible idea: it's a webcatalog/listing (wiki in this case) of sites. "The free directory about every domain in the world that anyone can edit" as in illegal websites, porn as well?
i must admit though, my excitement level has been higher before.
FYI, I have asked "Ray King" for an interview today. I have yet to hear back from him.
Looks like their site is down. Maybe the funding ran out?
Here is what I get from the main page:
A database error has occurred
Query: BEGIN
Function: Database::begin
Error: 2013 Lost connection to MySQL server during query (10.10.10.200)
Backtrace:
GlobalFunctions.php line 602 calls wfBacktrace()
Database.php line 473 calls wfDebugDieBacktrace()
Database.php line 419 calls DatabaseMysql::reportQueryError()
Database.php line 1546 calls DatabaseMysql::query()
Database.php line 1516 calls DatabaseMysql::immediateBegin()
Database.php line 393 calls DatabaseMysql::begin()
Database.php line 310 calls DatabaseMysql::query()
Database.php line 228 calls DatabaseMysql::open()
LoadBalancer.php line 441 calls DatabaseMysql::Database()
LoadBalancer.php line 390 calls LoadBalancer::reallyOpenConnection()
LoadBalancer.php line 628 calls LoadBalancer::openConnection()
LoadBalancer.php line 125 calls LoadBalancer::getLagTimes()
LoadBalancer.php line 185 calls LoadBalancer::getRandomNonLagged()
LoadBalancer.php line 355 calls LoadBalancer::getReaderIndex()
DatabaseFunctions.php line 52 calls LoadBalancer::getConnection()
PermissionOverride.php line 56 calls wfGetDB()
Setup.php line 211 calls wfReadPermissions()
Setup.php line 211 calls call_user_func()
index.php line 80 calls require_once()
weird - works for me...
Welp - 2 emails and a voicemail - no reply as of yet. So I am still trying to get an interview with "Ray King" - will update if he responds. :)
"Sorry I haven't returned your calls, sugar. I've been busy stroking my rathbone." OK, I obviously wrote that to make a point. The potential for vandalism on aboutus is very real, and *very* dangerous to the business welfare of millions of bona fide websites. If the huge traffic numbers are any indication, they'll be unable to scale the human reviews necessary to keep the vandalism down to a dull roar. All good points above, and thanks for the original thoughtful post.
I coouldn't agree more than this Ray King guy (see Rathbone's full ego exposed on www.raysworld.com) has defrauded his investors, violated more copyrights in one fell swoop than anyone in history, and caused what will undoubtedly be millions of unproductive hours to be spent by webmasters (like me) who'd rather not have to monitor this and fix the damage every vandal imposes on my sites. We need less spam in this world, not more.
King has basically enabled vandals, so I hope his engineers built good enough defenses to keep the uberhackers from doing damage to millions of site descriptions en masse. Right now I'm guess this putz is laughing all the way to the bank, imagining that all PR is good PR, and that the traffic will translate to a youtube kind of valuation. Only who in their right mind would pay six pennies for a site that comes with this much legal baggage?
Anyone want to buy stock in another Napster? Alexa's wayback machine is an example of *fair* use. They don't try to monetize the traffic from the Alexa pages. What King is doing is more like fax spam, costing the recipient resourcs/time to read through and deal with his crap.
It is intended to be monetized, clearly, through the theft of millions of web sites' copyrighted material. If you ask me this guy should be jailed, and his investors should have their checkbooks taken away permanently. They've crossed the line of business ethics, shrouded behind a completely lame legal argument that aboutus constitutes "fair use". The attorney who advised them as such should be disbarred for doing so. Anyone interested in a class action suit?? There's $1M in the bank but I've heard this Ray King guy and his investors are worth hundreds of millions.
Some of his advisors are board members of SnapNames, like King. King was replaced as CEO of that company a year or two ago, maybe so he could start this debacle. Let's see... Steve Babson, a private equity guy and former chairman of law firm Stoel Rives - you'd think he'd know better than to put his ass on the liability line with this legal lightning rod. Keith Teare... the Edgio guy, and former RealNames guy (there's a deal that lost >$100M in venture capital so at least King's getting expert advice on how to lose investors' monies!) but you'd think he'd be smarter than to get involved with this Ray King profiteering, defrauding, egomaniacal sleazeball. Maybe we're all wrong and like the direct marketers who spam our mailboxes these guys WILL laugh all the way to the bank.
But I hate them. I really and truly hate their entire concept, and how they've moved the line for the next guy to come along and further violate our rights, privacies, and peace.
Vindicated. That's all I'm going to say.
I have read some of the posts on aboutus.org and I agree with all that I read but, the one comment I hoped to read I did not see, and that is: apparently their bot extracts all or many of the pages from your site and places them in link pages with 1,000 + other links making it near impossible to find the link, but that link page is picked up by google (maybe others but haven't found them) so that when you do a search on google by site name it brings up all the link pages on aboutus.org with a link to your site, what this means is it can double the number of listings in search for your site with half of the links going to aboutus link pages and nowere near your site unless people take the time to read the address after the linking. Example: I have a page on one of my sites named Animals and there is a link listed for Animals-about us going to their site link page(s) for those having 100 pages on their site in time they will have 200 pages and one half of them going to aboutus.org I have contacted google and waiting for a response as I consider this whole thing a fraud and a damage to every website listed in search's. I would hope google has enough money that they do not stoop to that level to turn people away from the legitamite sites on the web, if not my intent is to contact the prosecuters in their home states as I consider this fraud and we will see if I am right.
Thanks for allowing me to add my 2 cents worth, also check you searchs in google to see if you have been victimized by this
Trabob
$1 million sounds like a lot -- but from a dozen investors? That means less than $100,000 per investor. So this is a typical doctors-and-dentists thing, with a couple of self-style "angel investors," i.e., wannabes.
We have our domain homepage locked with false information on the AboutUs website and I am the domain owner.
The person that has made the comments on our now locked domain page admits he has never even visited our website but AboutUs has let him post his comments and locked the domain owner from making the truth be known and then locked that users page so we could not even question the actions, this is simply unprofessional you would agree.
The following users have been advised and nothing has been done: Ray, Brandon, Mark, Simon, Ted and Kristina (So Far...)
In the meantime we have started a complete reference on the AboutUs site and all the many dissatisfied users and all the complaints that have been made against this website and I can not really blame them as I was actually working to help this AboutUs website with automated templates and user profiles but not now as they treat people that help them like garbage as the AboutUs website is very BIAS and does not follow any of it polices. This is my opinion and therefore should not be removed according to the sites policy so...
Please advise by email everyone you know of the link below to save themselves the hassles of the AboutUs website, do you friends a favor and let them know the truth and post this everywhere perhaps on your my space account also help protect your privacy from these people that will say things about you and then not let you edit the lies. In many countries this is illegal to make libelous and bias remarks but AboutUs appears to be above the law even though it resides in America, post on the wiki below if you have ever been harassed or mistreated by the staff or other users that staff protect and the unfair practices of the AboutUs.org website I am certain enough people will allow us to treat them with the respect that they have shown us.
http://wiki.artsapience.com/index.php/AboutUs.org
You run a Pro-Pediphile site and expect AboutUs to not give you a hassle.
I am involved in a project to basically create a website that competes with and is one step ahead of Aboutus dot org.
We are going to require opt-in/registration, have a bad language filter, anti-spam filters, and are considering the registered person to only be able to modify content if their email address includes a domain name like bob@centernetworks.com, who could only edit centernetworks.com or centernetworks.net, etc.
My questions is how would you do it better? And we are planning on have premium listings and advertising through premium membership.
Our goal is simple, help sites get more traffic, by giving them tools to improve their SEO. Let me know what you guys think.
Dan
Aboutus.org actually needs to be booted form google Aboutus.org is the king of spam .