Now, with the introduction of Socialthing for Websites, a service that made a quiet debut last week on AOL's country music destination "The Boot," AOL is transforming all their media properties into social media properties.

How it Works

With Socialthing, web site visitors can sign in to the various web sites using their AOL screenname and password, and soon their Bebo, Facebook, Gmail, Yahoo, or OpenID, instead of having to create a new account on the site. This ability puts it up against other single sign-in heavyweights like Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect. The authentication is made possible by the AOL Open Authentication (OpenAuth) Platform which allows sites to authenticate users using AOL and AIM usernames and passwords and is now being expanded to support the other services as well.

In addition, visitors can also chat with each other over AIM and ICQ while on the site itself, a feature that allows for real-time interactions between those who share common interests.

And then there is, of course, the social syndication aspect. Site visitors will be able to share messages and experiences across the social web including sites like Bebo, AIM, ICQ, Facebook, Myspace and Twitter.

Socialthing Differentiates Itself from FriendFeed & Competes with Facebook Connect

The authentication aspect, the active social sharing, and the online chat now set the new Socialthing for Websites apart from its one-time competitor FriendFeed. Today's Socialthing service is much more than a simple lifestream aggregator - it's a tool that can transform closed sites into social web portals. But will Socialthing pick up any traction outside of AOL's own properties? It could since the platform is open for developers to build services on top of it or integrate it into their own sites. That may actually have some appeal over, say, Facebook Connect for example, since it won't limit you to sharing your content with just one social networking site.

However, now that Facebook has opened up their data streams to developers, it's clear that the battle for conversation control is just getting started. Despite Socialthing's open nature, it's possible they'll still have a tough time competing considering the Facebook revolution that's currently underway.

AOL says Socialthing will launch on their blog for movie enthusiasts, Cinematical, in the "coming weeks" before rolling out the technology to the rest of their sites.

Earlier this year, AOL acquired Bebo for a hefty $850 million. While the news was huge, we didn't think the acquisition would be particularly beneficial to AOL or Bebo. I don't see this being any different with SocialThing! in the picture now. The acquisition is still coming to a close and no financial details have yet to be released. SocialThing! has published a blog post with more details about the acquisition.

Web 2.0 Going Mainstream?

This acquisition may have other results outside of bringing AOL more consumers. For instance, lifestreaming is definitely picking up in the mainstream arena. We've written plenty of articles about lifestreaming in recent weeks because we're noticing that the trend is spreading. Is it going mainstream? There has definitely been a ton of recent activity to hint at it. First, Facebook integrates the aggregation of popular services such as Twitter and Flickr. Now AOL is snapping up SocialThing!. It should only be a matter of time before bids for FriendFeed start to float around. Outside of lifestreaming, but still in the web 2.0 arena, CBS acquired Last.FM last year for $280 million. So, let me rephrase my question: are different components of web 2.0 going mainstream or is the entire concept finally catching on?

While SocialThing does the things it does well, it never quite got the hype and user base that its nearest direct competitor Friendfeed has been getting for the last few months. While SocialThing CEO and founder Matt Galligan pointed out to us that he doesn't think SocialThing is actually competing with FriendFeed, the similarities between the two are just too striking.

It is true, though, that SocialThing is less focused on creating an internal community and puts more emphasis on sharing information back to the aggregated services than Friendfeed, especially since they just integrated ping.fm updates.

It will be interesting to see what AOL is going to do with this new property. Chances are that it will be integrated into AOL's new BuddyUpdate service or that the SocialThing team will move over to work on BuddyUpdates while SocialThing itself will become a thing of the past.

How would you describe Socialthing! in simple terms?

Socialthing!'s goal is to be what we call a "digital life manager". It's a place that you will see the things that you and your friends are doing, interact with them (while those interactions publish to the originator of the content) and also be able to create content from the interface while it publishes to all the networks you might be a part of)

Many people see FriendFeed and Socialthing! as serving a very similar purpose. Do you think Socialthing! is in competition with FriendFeed or do you feel that they are two separate audiences and the services can coexist? If so, how do you see each being used simultaneously? If not why or how do you think Socialthing! is better than FriendFeed or Ping.fm?

I think that Socialthing! and FriendFeed are two very different things. Socialthing! is a digital life manager, a single place that you will go to manage the networks that you're a part of elsewhere. FriendFeed is a place that you go to create meaningful conversation around content. The aggregation of the content means that everything that's in there can be conversed around. The conversation stays inside of FriendFeed for good reason, because elsewhere, it may be out of context.

Socialthing! isn't necessarily better or worse than FriendFeed, just different. They're two very different value propositions, and it just depends on how you want to interact with your networks, and whether or not you think adding another network into the confusion is a good/bad thing. As for distinctions with Ping.fm, they are just simply a publisher of status, much like Profilactic's 155+ isn't only because of our lack of the time that we've been on the market, and us being in private beta. It's because the services do very different things with those services. One is that we don't just aggregate a feed, but rather, aggregate your feed, all of your friends, and all of the things that they've been doing on those services. This is an incredible amount of more work. This means that there has to be a solid UI to support it, especially considering information overload. It also means that there has to be a scalable way to be able to fetch so many friends at once. One thing that's also very different about our infrastructure is that we do live calls to the sites when the user comes to our site, so that for certain services that make more sense to have it, the information is fresh, rather than 20+ minutes old. For sites like Twitter, this is of utmost importance.

Now, going forward we do intend on adding services at a very rapid pace, but we are also letting our community vote on these services. Since helping manage peoples' digital lives is our game, we need to make sure we have all of the most important services implemented, so we're including a Digg-like voting mechanism soon that will take care of this and let us know which services are most important to our users.

We're also planning on going far beyond just doing basic social services that have explicit content being generated, but we'll be elaborating more on this later.

As for the profile page, we'll be implementing this soon, and we'll have more details on it also when it's released.

When I wrote my review of the two services, the reason that I chose Socialthing! over FriendFeed was because Socialthing! sends all user activity out to the external sites whereas FriendFeed keeps everything internal as FriendFeed comments. This essentially makes FriendFeed a social network of social networks while Socialthing! is (currently) an aggregator for social networks. In fact, I feel that FriendFeed is adding to my information overload whereas Socialthing! currently helps me receive a lot of information and deal with it efficiently. Do you see that changing and Socialthing! becoming a network of sorts or was that an intentional decision?

I don't see us changing in that manner. We don't want to be a social network on our own. One distinction between us and all of our "competitors" is that there is actually no concept of "friend" on our site. If you're friends with somewhere on the social web, then you're friends on our site. The idea behind this was that there's just simply too much "friending" that exists on the web right now, and going and searching for your friends with every single new service that pops up is annoying and repetitive, so not requiring the user to do that was of utmost importance.

As for the commenting and things like that, it's likely that in the future, FriendFeed will do whatever they can to push those comments outside of the FriendFeed architecture, but it's also going to be difficult. Currently they don't work with any APIs, and even when they do, pushing back comments is not exactly the easiest thing to do, especially with the context that they're providing. But they're smart, and they'll get it done. The question for the consumer at that point is whether they want to have another place to have a conversation or something to simply sift through all of the unmanageable streams of activities.

Is there a plan to release a public API, embeddable widgets, or other ways to export the aggregated data out of Socialthing!?

We have a very solid API roadmap currently in the plans. The API will allow most all of the functionality of the existing website to be put elsewhere. Our thought is that people will build desktop apps, mobile apps and other mashups so that the information that we're aggregating/displaying can be consumed in interesting ways.

We will provide a few of our own things, however, things like Javascript widgets and the like. But at the same time, we've seen an incredible success by companies building things like desktop applications built on Twitter that Twitter didn't have to spend any time on at all. We like this and will likely be hoping for a similar result.

How do you think you are improving or plan to improve or innovate the concept of lifestreaming? And finally, what do you think is Socialthing!'s killer app? What is the one feature that will set it apart from the competition and hopefully help it gain greater market share?

The concept of Lifestreaming is very new, and I guarantee you that if you were to ask the average Facebook user what a Lifestream is they would have absolutely no idea. But they know what their NewsFeed is for sure. So that's what we want to innovate on. Bringing Lifestreaming to the masses with a very simple, easy to use interface where there is hardly any onboarding process required.

As for our killer app? I think it's simply just being able to see what all of your friends on all of your networks are doing without ever having to add them, and then being able to communicate with them, all without ever leaving the same site. Imagine Meebo, or Trillian for social networks.

One approach is to aggregate information about our and our friends' activities across all the networks we participate in at one location. Such locations are commonly called "lifestreaming applications." Two of these applications, FriendFeed and SocialThing!, have taken a particularly high profile in the past few days.

We predicted that the network of networks FriendFeed would be the breakout app of SXSW 2008. It's not clear how big an impact that event made on the service but in the days following, it's blown up. In FriendFeed, friends create accounts and add all of their independent feeds from blogs, bookmarking, music services etc. Then the service aggregates your friends' feeds into one concise stream. It currently supports 28 services ranging from Amazon Wishlists to Zooomr photos to more common feeds like Twitter, Facebook and Flickr.

Sean Ammirati interviewed the founders of FriendFeed at ReadWriteTalk in February (podcast+transcript). Tech blogger Louis Gray has taken the lead in covering FriendFeed and related services. See also satire site

SocialThing! is the new kid on the (new) block and still in private beta. It currently supports just six services (Twitter, Pownce, Flickr, Facebook, Livejournal and Vimeo), but looks considerably prettier than FriendFeed - in case that matters to anyone. I had a chance to speak to the SocialThing! developers at SXSW and they assured me that everything was in place for new services to start becoming available quickly.

Key Differences

FriendFeed has a bit of a head start, but even barring that, there are more intuitive features in place despite its visual shortcomings. The most notable is that it links you to your friends' content even if you don't have access to a particular service. The reason is that when you friend someone on FriendFeed, that person has generated an actual account on the service, so they've elected to port in all of their desired feeds. So my friends can read my Ma.gnolia links even if they're a Del.icio.us users and vice versa. It's in this feature that its real power lies.

The reason SocialThing! will face pitfalls is that it's really just an RSS aggregator and as such, it doesn't do anything that you couldn't just do with your regular aggregator. Because FriendFeed creates a new network, it can do a variety of entirely new tasks, like suggesting new friends, a feature that I've found to be remarkably accurate in predicting individuals whom I'd actually be interested in. Additionally, FriendFeed adds functions such as inline commenting and "like" (thumbs up for a particular item) that add to the social experience.

Why FriendFeed is Better

Social media will continue to escalate for the foreseeable future, but it will become increasingly unlikely that you'll have accounts for every service out there. With FriendFeed, you don't have to, because of its network of networks, you can just coast along with the few accounts you're comfortable with, but still have access to friendly content across the board. This is the true innovation and it's the reason users will adopt FriendFeed over an RSS wrapper like SocialThing!

These are just the two most prominent of many lifestreaming services that have launched recently. See the ReadWriteWeb primer on lifestreaming from January and our list of 35 lifestreaming apps from last month. While Facebook's newsfeed has been copied by almost every other social network online, other innovators and entrepreneurs are aiming to offer more powerful versions of the same idea in standalone, cross-application lifestreaming services.