Log in to the AOL-owned Bebo social network this morning and you’ll see a whole new home page. Like AOL.com, they’ve integrated direct access to AOL, Yahoo and Gmail email accounts, as well as a feed reader. They’ve also fully integrated the Social Thing activity tracker (AOL acquired Social Thing in August 2008), and are adding content that you may like based on a new content recommendation engine that the team has built from the ground up.
The Social Thing integration is an excellent way to track your friends. Unlike FriendFeed, where you track people and create a new friend list, Social Thing lets you simply enter your credentials for your favorite services (Twitter, Delicious, etc.). Social Thing then uses available APIs from those services to pull in activity from the people you already track there. It saves a step, and removes a lot of the clutter that comes with Friendfeed.
The recommendation engine is also a great feature. It determines video, music, groups and games that you may like based on stated preferences and aggregated data on what your friends are up to, as well as people like you and your friends.
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We need the ability to bury or mark comments as spam.
Sounds interesting, I like the look of it and love all the new features. For once AOL is becoming relevant…
Interesting Social Network. I’ll find time to try this one.
Yeah! I’ve seen this one and… WOW!
Hi,
Does Social Thing store your credentials for each of those services then? I hope not - I thought we were moving away from crazy practices like that.
Or have I misunderstood?
-J
The distinction should be made - socialthing.com still needs to store certain credentials (not by choice, but by necessity).
The Bebo integration is simply username, so obviously we store that (but no password necessary yet).
The trouble is, Twitter and other sites that aren’t quite using OAuth or other token based authentication require that we send them the password for certain API calls. In those instances, the only way we can do that is to store credentials. Obviously if you don’t trust a site, you shouldn’t be giving over your username and password, however, we have made it a point to make it very clear to our users that it isn’t something we LIKE to do, but rather, must to accomplish the features.
Ya, better than I would have expected, great social thing. http://www.youtechno.info
Given Bebo’s audience profile, integration with services such as Social Thing is pretty much the only thing to do: give the kids & teens what they want!
I applaud AOL for doing this. They’ve been stagnant for too long & it’s good to see that they’re trying to break that habit. Furthermore, they’ve picked a great area to target. The social networking scene IS too fragmented. It would be nice to be able to log into just one site and keep up with all my friends regardless of what site(s) they’re on.
The problem, as I see it, is that this requires joining ANOTHER social network. I can’t speak for the entire market. But, personally, I’m tired of joining sites. I just want to use the one’s I’m on.
On a side-note, the CrunchBase widget is wrong, it’s http://bebo.com/ NOT co.uk