Social media is coming to Warner Bros. Television Group's online properties, thanks to a smallish AOL property called Socialthing.
A feed of members' activity across Warner Bros. entertainment sites--TheWB.com, KidsWB.com, DC Hero Zone, MomLogic, Essence, and TheCW.com--will be displayed on their Socialthing profiles. So, if you watch a "Gossip Girl" video on TheCW.com or play a game on DC Hero Zone, it'll show up in your feed, and you can keep tabs on what your friends are doing as well (and share bits of content with them). There will also be fictional Socialthing profiles for characters like the "Gossip Girl" cast as part of a broader promotional effort.
As some others have pointed out, it's nice to see AOL finally showing some synergy with parent company Time Warner. You know, before it gets spun off and all.
AOL purchased Socialthing, a would-be competitor to FriendFeed, last summer and integrated it into the "People Networks" division anchored by the company's earlier acquisition of Bebo. Last month, AOL relaunched Socialthing as "a revolutionary new platform that brings social-networking services to Web sites and enables publishers to attract new users and keep them engaged wherever they are on the Web" and announced that it would be working the service into its MediaGlow content network.
From what it sounds like, it won't be all that different to what Viacom has been doing with its own "social platform" technology, Flux. Right now, members can log in with AOL and AIM accounts, but it'll soon be expanded to include Facebook, Gmail, Yahoo, and OpenID credentials with the help of the various data portability tools out there.
Disclosure: The CW television network is a joint venture between Warner Bros. and CBS. CNET News is published by CBS Interactive, a unit of CBS.
AOL's People Networks division, formed when the company acquired Bebo, has picked up a new friend: Socialthing, a Boulder, Colo.-based start-up that aggregates social feeds from sites like Digg, Twitter, and Flickr.
The acquisition has not yet been completed, but is close to it.
No financial details have yet been released regarding the acquisition of Socialthing, which falls into the same niche as FriendFeed and is still in private beta. The company is a new one; it emerged out of Boulder's TechStars incubator and had its official launch party at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in March--where the company instantly gained word-of-mouth buzz when the soiree was still raging past 3 a.m. The buy was first reported early this month by TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld, who speculated that it was "likely a small purchase."
The People Networks division at AOL is headed by Joanna Shields, who was CEO of Bebo when it was acquired. Also encompassed in the group are AOL's two instant-messaging services, AIM and ICQ, and acquisitions Goowy and Yedda.
Getting bought was probably a good move for Socialthing. In recent months, Facebook has started to institute feed activity from other sites in its members' news feeds, creating a potential threat to standalone aggregator services.
2007 was the year of platforms, and I'm just about ready to call 2008 the year of social aggregators, or services that help you group together and manage all the social sites you're a part of. Opening up (in private beta) on Monday is Socialthing, a new contender that joins the ranks of Plaxo, MyBlogLog, Spokeo, Iminta, Profilactic, Friendfeed, and Facebook in giving you a single place to aggregate and interact with all that information in one, centralized feed.
As with some of the others in this space, Socialthing takes your log-ins and usernames from each service and grabs data from each throughout the day. I give my kudos though, if you're already signed into any of the services, authenticating them in your browser doesn't even require a single keystoke--this is going to be incredibly helpful when you're adding in several dozen services at a time. It's also smart enough to seek out all the people who are your friends or contacts from each service without you having to add them on your own. It's a great feature that kept competitor FriendFeed from being as easy to jump into immediately.
In addition to its desktop browser experience, Socialthing has a slick-looking iPhone app. It looks and functions similar to Facebook and Plaxo's iPhone apps, with tabs and large streams of eyeball-friendly data. Unfortunately, it doesn't perform as well, or do as much as either of the two competitors, which double as massive, portable phone books with up-to-date contact information. Socialthing's CEO Matt Galligan says the company has much more in store for the iPhone app, including ways to post a message to several services at the same time. In its current form you can post to Twitter and Pownce with the same message. Facebook is being added later tonight.
Despite having the lowest number of integrated services (see chart below) Galligan tells me the team is on track to add about 200 others in the coming months. He believes Socialthing's implicit understanding that you don't want to track down people you're friends with will draw people who are using these services to make social data aggregation easier. To help that cause, the service will soon be adding a discovery feature that will automatically show data from networks your friends are a part of, even if you're not. This means that if a friend of yours is using a service you're not familiar with, you'll still see whatever he or she posted--something that might help you discover new sites. Friendfeed has something similar, and it's definitely helpful.
Socialthing was nice enough to give at least 1,000 Webware readers access to the service starting on Monday morning. You can sign up on this page with the invite code CNET.
Monitor your friend's activities from multiple social streams with Socialthing. Unlike some others, it will seek out people you're buddies with so you don't have to add them.
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