AboutUs acquires Jyte.com

by Ray King on 13 January 2010

It’s a new year – heck, it’s a new decade – and we’re off to a creative start with a piece of news to share.

We’ve just acquired Jyte, a site that I’ve always loved. On Jyte anyone can toss out a claim, and the Jyte community opines with votes, comments and related claims. It’s a great way to validate – or invalidate! – your thoughts, and get unabashed feedback from both people you know and total strangers.

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.

Related posts:

  1. New for Jyte: Suggest contacts from Gmail
  2. Progress for Jyte: Goodbye Spam, Hello Cred
  3. The Five Minute Intro to AboutUs for Jyters
  4. AboutUs acquires 1-800-AboutUs
  5. The AboutUs Buzz: February Edition

{ 37 comments… read them below or add one }

Marshall Kirkpatrick January 13, 2010 at 2:39 pm

Congrats folks, that’s really cool!

dave w January 13, 2010 at 3:51 pm

Congrats on the purchase.

I’m sure you’ll find lots of suggestions for improvements lurking in the data.

Good luck.

Nyco January 13, 2010 at 4:28 pm

We’re hiring Agile Ruby Developers! Get in touch with us if you’d like to be part of this exciting time at our company.

user January 13, 2010 at 5:05 pm

what are you going to do about all the fake claims/advertising?

KristinaWeis January 13, 2010 at 5:20 pm

We’re still working on the transition. We want to make sure that claims are relevant and spam-free because the Jyte community is important to us. If you have suggestions post them below or send to Jyte@AboutUs.org.

Rael January 13, 2010 at 5:26 pm

Congratulations, are you gonna fix the 500 errors caused by my OpenID handle?

Nick Burrus January 13, 2010 at 8:40 pm

Very awesome. :].

I am betting Kristina spent a better part of the day working to become number one at Jyte clearing up spam and all. :) .

Good job AboutUS!

And Rael, as far as I know yes. Everytime I had a OpenID problem, Brandon Sanders or Ward Cunningham were very good at fixing the problem quickly. :]

Pete Forsyth January 13, 2010 at 9:20 pm

Yeeha! Congrats guys :)

Das Boot January 14, 2010 at 12:11 am

There’s a Jyte community? Maybe two years ago, but hardly so today. I’m not sure if it’s possible to bring the old guard back together. Maybe if Jyte is cleaned up enough some new faces will stick around.

Rael January 14, 2010 at 8:32 am

There IS a Jyte community, a small one, I’m sure not the one you were used to. Probably the old folks wouldn’t join again but that’s the past and it’s gone. But there is always new people.

Neo Rara Avis January 14, 2010 at 9:58 am

Hopefully that hellhole can be fixed up now, I’m sick of all the broken links and laptop battery spam. That and maybe a fresh fix would get more people to come. It’s worth a try.

KristinaWeis January 14, 2010 at 4:36 pm

We got the keys to some spam combating tools today and we hope you notice a difference. We don’t know when we will be able to fix broken links, but it would be great to start compiling a list. I’ve noted the “blog” link in the footer and I would love to add others you know of to the list: Jyte@AboutUs.org.

Nick Burrus January 15, 2010 at 8:32 pm

Das Boot, you yourself are proving there is a community there. :]

XISTH January 16, 2010 at 5:38 pm

I’d add fixing the cred system and individual dashboards to the list.

KristinaWeis January 18, 2010 at 4:37 pm

XISTH, I’m still a bit confused by the cred system and how it should work. By individual dashboard, are you talking about http://jyte.com/home when you’re logged in?

Would you mind sending more info about how you see the problem to Jyte@AboutUs.org?

Rael January 19, 2010 at 9:32 am

The cred system should work like this as described by the Jyte Help section.

KristinaWeis January 20, 2010 at 3:01 pm

Yes, I’ve read that ;) and I’m still trying to figure out what is and isn’t working with it.

I’ve noticed that a few people with cred points for “wiki” have given some to me and I have not gained any points. Also, people have given me cred for things they don’t have cred for and also no points have been transferred. It seems like you can do the act of giving cred and it will say x # of people have given so-and-so cred, but the actual point transfer and showing of top qualities doesn’t happen like it used to?

As always, any more info would be helpful to Jyte@AboutUs.org.

Rael January 21, 2010 at 12:10 pm

KristinaWeis, yes, that is the actual problem with the cred system, the cred score is not getting updated.

Jonathan Rascher January 21, 2010 at 8:01 pm

Oh, this is interesting. I’m not really active on Jyte any more, but I wish you all the best of luck in reviving and maintaining it.

Hmm January 23, 2010 at 4:21 pm

If you want to increase the size of the Jyte “community” (if you can call it that), you might want to add the ability to login with methods other than OpenID.

Kirk January 25, 2010 at 1:33 pm

Are you guys looking to integrate it within the AboutUs.org site? Or will it sit separate in it’s own space?

KristinaWeis January 25, 2010 at 1:53 pm

Hmm: That’s a good suggestion, thank you.

Kirk: We are still working on the integration plan, but for now Jyte will remain its own property.

pextubing January 28, 2010 at 2:13 pm

I am sure you will find many suggestions to improve the quality

fiXedd January 31, 2010 at 1:58 am

I knew SOMETHING had to be up because I logged into Jyte and it took less than 30 seconds for a page to load!

Now if we can just get a functioning cred system and get the 500 errors fixed it’ll be back to it’s former glory.

KristinaWeis February 2, 2010 at 10:28 am

The 500 errors should mostly be fixed now :)

We’re trying to figure out how cred used to work and fixing it is on our to-do list.

Anonymous February 3, 2010 at 8:39 am

Yes, Individual Dashboards are http://jyte.com/home.

KristinaWeis February 3, 2010 at 3:59 pm
Bill Burcham March 23, 2010 at 9:23 am

I went to Jyte yesterday. You know, I still like Jyte a lot. I’m glad AboutUs is carrying the baton!

Syam March 23, 2010 at 10:07 am

Wishing you a prosperous growth with Jyte. It can do wonderful changes. I can see that you have strated some good initiation in aboutus.org ( about some link adding to website ) … Best of Luck, with Best Regards

MarkDilley March 23, 2010 at 5:13 pm

Bill, glad you are happy about that! Don Park is working on it – if you have any ideas for it.

Grr April 5, 2010 at 5:28 pm

Can you allow blockquotes in the comment fields? There are other helpful HTML elements that could be included, too. And provide a quick link that shows which are allowed? And maybe provide a better place for us to suggest improvements like this? :)

KristinaWeis April 6, 2010 at 10:39 am

That’s an interesting idea, Grr. I don’t actually use comments that much on Jyte myself, and I tend to get dizzy when I see a long comment thread :P

From what I hear, the best place to suggest a new feature is to make a claim on Jyte.com about it and tag it as “jyte” and “feature request” (or “bug”). And if you want to make sure we see it, you can always email jyte@aboutus.org.

uhhh April 16, 2010 at 6:11 am

And what’s with all the weird subdomains? ryangroveisawesome.jyte.com? ww.jyte.com? http://www.yrboafv.jyte.com? They don’t seem to work quite right, but they come up in google searches…

KristinaWeis April 17, 2010 at 10:34 am

I’ve noticed the subdomains in search results as well. I don’t fully understand, but it’s a result of Jyte.com having a wild card DNS. I’m not sure why it was set up that way.

Dream Web Services January 10, 2011 at 1:38 am

Looking back, this really was some interesting news a year ago when this happened. Jyte was a distinctly different service.

MarkDilley May 17, 2011 at 9:29 am
Peter Drosten July 22, 2011 at 5:20 am

I like Jyte very much and follow Jyte for a long time.

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