Weeks After Going Viral, Threewords.me Is Up For Sale

That was fast.

A few weeks ago you may have come across a site called Threewords.me with a very simple premise: invite your friends and online followers to describe you with three words. It’s about as simple as they come, but the site managed to get quite a bit of early traction by feeding off retweets and Facebook shares (which were in turn driven by our collective narcissism). You can see our initial coverage on the site right here.

Now the site’s 18 year old creator, Mark Bao, is looking to sell the project. His reason? According to a comment he left on Hacker News, Threewords was just a side project and he intends to dedicate more time to his startup Supportbreeze, among other things.

The site is sporting some solid stats, including 253,000 users, 1.42 million total entries, 4.9 million unique visitors and 17.2 million page views — not bad given that it’s been around for less than a month. But caveat emptor to anyone thinking this site is guaranteed to stay popular for the long haul — it could well have been a flash in the pan (after all, Bao would have probably kept working on it if it was in fact the Next Big Thing). I haven’t seen a Threewords link in my Twitter stream for days, and they were all over the place a couple weeks ago. Still, it’s clear that people really like getting feedback about themselves (which isn’t surprising given the popularity of Formspring). You just need to find a way to keep them coming back.

The site is being sold via private auction, so it isn’t clear what kind of price Bao is expecting to get for this.