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SocialThing, a lifestreaming/social aggregation site, has been acquired by AOL, TechCrunch reports. We currently have no information about the final price of the acquisition, but given that SocialThing was still in private beta, we assume that it was relatively low. SocialThing was founded in 2007 with $15,000 in seed capital from TechStars. AOL seems to be rather interested in the lifestreaming and aggregation business these days. As AOL product manager Frank Gruber reported, AOL also just released its AIM BuddyUpdates yesterday.

If there's a hot new social media trend happening, you can bet that companies are trying to find a way to use it too. It happened of course with blogging, it happened with Twitter, and it is now happening with FriendFeed and other lifestreaming apps.

UPDATE: On August 16, 2008 ReadWriteWeb was sent a letter from the lawyers of a company named Fricken, which states that Fricken owns a trademark for the term 'brandstream'. Accordingly we acknowledge here that Pheedo did not coin the term, as we initially thought.

Indeed RSS vendor Pheedo has coined a neat term for this: brandstreaming [Update: Brian Solis notes in the comments that Pheedo probably didn't coin it]. Pheedo defines a brandstream as "a consistent flow of content created by a brand".

To back up its case for brands using lifestreaming tools, Pheedo points to a recent Universal McCann report stating that content consumption outside of websites has increased 153% in the last 9 months. Overall, 53% of online users are consuming content outside of a publisher's site - through the use of widgets, RSS readers, social networks and mobile devices.

Not everyone loves FriendFeed - its social media firehouse qualities can lead to a lot of noise which can certainly be overwhelming to newcomers. However, even those who don't participate on the service may see the value of a lifestream. By hosting your own lifestream, you can easily share your current activities from across the social web with your web site's visitors. Once set up, it's somewhat like a passive form of a Tumblr blog. You continue your usual activities - upload photos to flickr, favorite videos on YouTube, bookmark pages on del.icio.us - and your web site will reflect those changes.

Lifestream.fm came onto the scene back in April of this year and was soon acquired by (once politically incorrect) social bookmarking company, Mister Wong. At the time of their launch, Lifestream.fm looked like just another attempt to compete with social media darling FriendFeed, and one that didn't really offer anything too special. But now that the service is under new ownership, they've been busy recoding, adding features, and fixing bugs. But have they done enough to warrant a second look?

RSS is magic and the things we do online are often beautiful - so why are all the interfaces for displaying the feeds of our activities so ugly? Enter Swurl, a visually stunning system for displaying a timeline of your activities on various sites around the web.

Developer Ryan Sit specializes in leveraging the visual to create new interfaces for data, his ListPic application lets users browse Craigslist by images. Just like Listpic creates a whole new experience for Craigslist, Sit hopes that Swurl will make interacting with lifestream data a much more visually enjoyable experience.

You can find tons of lifestream badges floating around sites. These badges showcase the latest online activity of the author and provides a little more insight into who they are and what they like. Lifestream badges also provides a way to share information with users that have similar interests. We've given you 35 ways to lifestream your life and Escaloop was one of them. So here's a look at their custom lifestream badge.

According to a post on the Facebook blog, Facebook will add the ability to comment on items in the Mini-Feed today, making it even more similar to Friendfeed. Within the last few months, Facebook started to allow users to aggregate their items from various external social media, photo, and bookmarking sites such as Flickr, del.icious, and StumbleUpon.

With this latest announcement, Facebook is starting to encroach even more on Friendfeed's territory.

Plurk, the latest lifestreaming service to make the rounds, certainly has one thing going for it - a sense of humor, albeit an odd one. The site is currently riding a wave of new registrations due to a mention from Leo Laporte, but is it worth your time or is it just another Twitter clone with a prettier UI?

How can people be sure that a blog comment left by "Bill Gates" is from the real Bill Gates? How does your lifestream aggregator know? Web developer Kyle Brady, creator of lifestream aggregator OneSwirl, has proposed a system he calls idAuth that he thinks addresses this issue. idAuth is a "push" system for data that can be linked to a specific identity. Theoretically, it would allow lifestream aggregators to collect data from across the web without the need for RSS/Atom feeds, and verify the validity of the id of the data owner.

Last month, we reported the arrival of Facebook's version of a lifestream when they began offering you a way to import content from various online services into your Facebook Mini-Feed. At the time, the only services available were Flickr, Picasa, Yelp, and del.icio.us. (Digg was added later on). Today, a post on the Facebook blog announces that you can now import from several other services, including YouTube, StumbleUpon, Hulu, Pandora, Last.fm, and Google Reader.

There's no denying that the campaign of Barack Obama has embraced social networking and new media like no campaign in history. Obama has accounts on Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, Digg, Flickr -- even on niche social networks AsianAve, MiGente, and Faithbase. And Obama, or someone in his campaign, actually uses the accounts and keeps them up-to-date. Could it be that likely Democratic nominee for president is actually using bleeding edge, early adopter-friendly lifestream aggregator FriendFeed? Actually, uh, no. That's not him.

There's an interesting, but tiresome discussion going around about whether FriendFeed contributes to the conversation or the noise. While we've already reviewed how FriendFeed can contribute to other problems such as information overload, the answer seems obvious that FriendFeed both contributes to the conversation and the noise. Here's a look at both sides of the coin.

Because Twitter is getting more popular, every glitch in the service is now felt more acutely. Going without Twitter for many people is even harder than going without email, and so outages lead to complaints. Complaints pile up and become debates, asking questions like: should Twitter be converted into a protocol and become decentralized? Is that the way to scale Twitter and make it more reliable? If not, how can that goal be accomplished?

German social bookmarking startup Mister Wong yesterday afternoon announced the acquisition of Lifestream.fm, a lifestreaming start up that's something like Friend Feed without the interactivity and using Twitter's design. While "lifestreaming" still barely registers on Google searches according to Google Trends, it is one of the most talked about new phenomena in the blogosphere (see this BlogPulse trend graph). Though Lifestream.fm isn't one of the top players (Friend Feed gets all the press), it is a very capable basic lifestream aggregator.

A new post on the Facebook blog announces the arrival of "a new way to share with friends" - that is, they're offering a way for you to import content from non-Facebook sites into your Facebook Mini-Feed and into your friends' News Feeds. This new option is being touted on the blogosphere as Facebook's "new lifestreaming feature." That is, by far, a grand overstatement of the service, which currently pales in comparison with its competitors.

By using FriendFeedStats, which creates service-level usage statistics from lifestream aggregator FriendFeed based on its public timeline, we can see which services are the most popular. Specifically, Twitter tends to dominate the conversation with about 44% of all activity on the service. Eric, over at Internet Duct Tape, spent the time to helpfully compile the stats and identify some trends.

Cross-site activity stream aggregator FriendFeed has answered the loud calls of users and developers and today released the first version of its Application Programming Interface, or API. The FriendFeed experience will now be accessible on platforms outside of the web page and FriendFeed user data should have all kinds of interesting things done with it.

FriendFeed is the new hotness and many people have asked for an API to take the service to the next level. There aren't any example apps built yet, nor has there been much developer feedback yet. A whole lot of things just became possible, though.

Backlash is probably too harsh a word, but as the buzz around lifestreaming continues to build, some people are starting to question where it fits into their daily lives. Last week, we wondered whether sites like FriendFeed solved the problem of information overload, or merely brought attention to it. Keeping track of all that activity is starting to feel like watching code in The Matrix, and this week, others are starting to feel the same way.

Here are some of the highlights from the week's Web Tech action on ReadWriteWeb. This week includes social networks and lifestreaming analysis (Facebook, FeedFriend and more), a look at new Semantic Apps, and a new service from Amazon. And don't forget to click through to our website and leave a comment on our posts, for a chance to win a daily $30 Amazon gift voucher.

Today we have 2 prizes to give away. They both come from a very appropriate post from Sarah Perez: The Conversation Has Left the Blogosphere. In it, Sarah noted that "a lot of new aggregation services and lifestreaming applications [have] come into play recently", which may be dragging discussions off blogs and onto the likes of FriendFeed, digg, and Mixx. Ironically perhaps, there were a lot of great comments on our post! ;-) Two I enjoyed explained how lifestreaming apps can actually help blogs get comments.