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AOL, a leading global advertising-supported Web company has recently acquired Socialthing, a private beta startup. SocialThing is a lifestreaming site that allows its users to aggregate their digital life as they can interact with multiple sites at once and can have aggregate collection of news feeds at one platform. The acquisition of a small private beta startup, that was incubated in 2007 with an angel funding of $15,000 by TechStars, by AOL depicts that the company is getting highly involved in the lifestreaming and aggregation business nowadays. Its recent launching
of AIM BuddyUpdates, which allows AIM users to share their actions with their buddy list by pulling information from services like Twitter, flickr, YouTube, Digg, StumbleUpon serves as an extension to its on growing interest in lifestreaming.
Though there isn’t any hearing about the final price of a deal but most probably it would be of low cost as the service didn’t even come out of its private phase. There is a misconception among various people as they treat Freindfeed and Socialthing as the similar services. But in reality both are far more different than each other. The newly incubated service far more better as it didn’t create hype since its launching and have been more focused on its central goal i-e to share aggregate info from multiple sites rather than to expand social community only. Its integration of ping.fm updates is one of the key examples.
Its acquisition in its embryo stage reflects that AOL was highly interested in its building team rather than its technology service. The site also outlined various deficiencies one of which is, its incompatibility with IE that ought to be a great hindrance in its popularity as IE is still used by sizable amount of Internet Users.
If we will sum up all the facts about SocialThing than it wouldn’t be wrong to say that AOL is actually trying to enhance its lifestreaming features. Its collaboration with other IM services like Meeboo and eBuddy, recently launched AIM updates and this latest acquisition clearly depicts its intention towards diverting or re-shaping its current business strategy. It seems that AOL will use team of SocialThing for developing its recently launched BuddyUpdates as both services are serving common purpose and chances are Socialthing will be most probably disappear in future.
