The terms weren’t disclosed, but you don’t need to consult any wikis to realize this is likely a very small deal.

AboutUs is just getting started, having raised a relatively small amount of venture capital (most recently $2.5 million from Voyager Capital) over the past few years.

On Jyte, people can toss out a claim, e.g. “There’s no one who can park a car in reverse better than me”, about yourself or other persons (hence ‘spreading the cred’ as they call it). The community – made up of people you know or don’t know at all – subsequently opines with votes, comments and related claims.

Basically, you can use Jyte to validate claims by putting them out there and let others have their say about them.

How Jyte fits into AboutUs’ strategy is a complete mystery to me, but here’s what CEO Ray King had to say about the purchase:

Jyte has a devoted community of people who enjoy debating each other’s claims. We plan to support that community by continuing to develop the site.

Jyte uses RPX, a technology that allows people to use a single portable identity across websites. Instead of creating a new login on every site you visit, use your existing Facebook, Google, Twitter, OpenID or other existing identity – brilliant! We’re planning to implement RPX on AboutUs as well.

Like Jyte, AboutUs has a strong community and we welcome Jyte folks to join us. We think the AboutUs community will enjoy getting to know Jyte as well, and we’re looking forward to learning interesting things from Jyte and its people.

Based on this blog post from 3 years ago, Jyte was built by entrepreneur and OpenID advocate Scott Kveton, JanRain’s Brian Ellin and Dag Rorek Arneson.

Update: I’ve been informed that Jyte was actually under ownership of JanRain, so this is a transaction between AboutUs and JanRain.

Kveton last week announced that he sold online bacon store – yes, really – bac’n to competitor BaconFreak.com.

Read up on that, it’s a cool story.

This is different from our own wiki Crunchbase, which featured detailed profiles of companies, products and people even if they don’t have their own websites.

The wiki service attracts a very decent 7 million unique visitors per month to its network of over 12 million pages, and has plans of turning it from a mere resource of information to a full-fledged collaborative work space. In that regard, it’s different from Wikipedia, although both wikis use MediaWiki to power the network.

AboutUs generates revenue from on-site advertising but also sells services like wiki page design and copywriting. According to TechFlash, who spoke with CEO Ray King, AboutUs is already running a profit from its operations, which probably explains why Voyager Capital took the risk of putting more money in the company even in the current economic climate.

We first wrote about the company back in November 2006 when it raised $1 million (the new investment brings its total funding is now about $5 million).

Sixteen investors total participated in the round, with Capybara Ventures and Northwest Technology Venture providing institutional backing. AboutUs founder Ray King was co-founder and CEO of SnapNames. The Board of Advisors for AboutUs includes wiki forefather Ward Cunningham, Stephen Babson of Endeavour Capital and Keith Teare of Edgeio. The AboutUs site went live in August and has seen healthy traffic growth. The site’s traffic after only a few months is one of its primary selling points.

AboutUs is built on MediaWiki, the same platform that Wikipedia runs on. It’s not the prettiest thing in the world to look at, but it’s functional. There are entries for about 3 million websites in the wiki. The vast majority are populated from Whois records, with related links and a Google Map added for each page. The 5 person company personally checks all edits each night, now between one and two thousand on average. (Founder Ray King says that adding the words “can I really change this?” is the most common edit people make to the site.) There isn’t a neutral point of view requirement, but review type text is encouraged to be placed in a special section for reviews.

There is something that bothers me about having 3 million pages about websites, populated automatically and by any random editor who stops by, titled “AboutUs.” The phrase implies an autobiographical text. (It’s also probably very good for SEO.) The AboutUs page on TechCrunch wasn’t written by anyone associated with TechCrunch and there’s something about the name AboutUs that makes me uncomfortable about that. I could certainly go in and change the entry, but it feels more like something I’m obligated to do unless I ignore it.

The company has partnerships with a number of domain registrars in the works to put links to each site’s AboutUs page at the top of WhoIs info, in exchange for a badge linked back to that registrar. King hopes that a growing number of websites will put links to their AboutUs.org pages on their sites, as he intends to add wiki functionality and a community edited About page to every site on the web that he can.

The site hasn’t been monetized yet; Ray King says they will explore premium features like paid job listings on company pages. I probed ruthlessly for some indication of an antisocial profit drive in King, as it took me a while to believe that a business based on content scraped from the WhoIs records of other sites could be legitimate. In the end, though, I was convinced that King really is a true believer in “the wiki way,” as he calls it, a collaborative culture based on presumptions of good faith.

Presumptions of good faith aside, I’d like at the very least an RSS feed to subscribe to changes being made to sites I’m connected to. King says that’s a high priority and will soon be one of a number of extensions he’s made to his MediaWiki implementation.

Can AboutUs succeed? If it does, it will be part of a general transition of the culture of the web. I like the idea of having wiki guides to websites, though calling it AboutUs makes me uncomfortable and I hope a wave of nasty edits doesn’t make me regret pointing to it. If a happy medium of wiki purity and some control over edits can be maintained, AboutUs could be well positioned in a world still deciding how it feels about “the wiki way.”