AboutUs, the wiki for anything that has its own website, has snapped up a tiny startup called Jyte, the company announced in a blog post moments ago.
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.