A couple weeks ago, I spotted the reincarnation of Socialthing on AOL’s country-music Website TheBoot and speculated that it would potentially be rolled out across AOL’s other MediaGlow properties as well. Today, a press release from AOL in my inbox confirms that MediaGlow “is in the process of deploying Socialthing across its network of more than 75 sites.”
Socialthing started out as a Friendfeed competitor when AOL bought it last year. It never came out of private beta, but its lifestreaming service found its way into Bebo, the social network AOL purchased for $850 million. Now, with Socialthing for Websites, AOL is combining it with AIM to compete with Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect.
As I wrote in my last post, Socialthing for Websites offers a single sign-in for participating Websites. Right now it accepts your AIM or AOL username and password, but will soon add Bebo, Facebook, Gmail, Yahoo and OpenID using OAuth. In addition to single sign-in, Socialthing creates a toolbar along the bottom of a Website that brings both group chat and private AIM chat to the site in the form of pop-up boxes, as well as a content stream that shows the latest articles and comments on the site as well as your personal lifestream of activityies from other sites.
As we saw from Facebook’s announcement yesterday to open up its own stream to developers so that they can create applications around the stream of constant updates from people’s social network, there is a battle going on to control the conversation. AOL is entering this battle with AIM and Socialthing. After it rolls Socialthing out across its own Websites, it will make Socialthing available to partner sites as well. And when it revamps AIM later this year, you can expect the Socialthing lifestream to be a big part of it.
Another competitor for FB Connect and G Friend Connect. But do you think Socialthing will sweep FB or Google off their feet? Not possible, for sure!!!
its good to have another player in the game. but it will be best if they all shared a common ground to make life easier for us (consumers and web developers)
Sounds like a great service. I look forward to trying it out. Also it’s good to see other sites integrating OpenID connections.
If history is any guide, anything AOL touches (post bubble 1.0) turns to lead. More losses and layoffs coming.
checked out the mediaglow network. http://www.mediaglow.com/
75 websites garbled together. how is this network keeping it simple?
look at mediaglows logo. ouch. at least the logo makes sense representing their garble network.
with networks like this and purchases like bebow AOL deserves to suffer. maybe this is just old scrap from the Ron-dy days of leadership. hopefully the garbage will get thrown out soon because aol’s network is festering.
NetworkLocator.com – tied together
Mediaglow’s strategy is at the level individual brands, so of course in aggregate doesn’t look simple, but users only have the relationships with the brand, not Mediaglow. And this seems to be working as Mediaglow has 9 #1 ranked comScore properties; in aggregate PV’s have grown 47% YOY.
MediaGlow is rocking out.
this is very exciting as the big 3 are now accelerating open, liquid and portable environments. The socio semantic web is now on its way to becoming a reality.
Myspace better get cracking or they are going to be left further in the dust.
Looks like more of a Meebo CommunityIM competitor to me. This is almost a direct copy of what they just launched: http://www.meeb...om/communityim/
So far I think Meebo’s approach is a little more compelling to non-AOL properties (from an integration perspective), given it’s seamless integration with the site’s user accounts… For example, login to flixster and you’re already logged into Meebo’s Community IM with the ability to chat with your flixster friends. No need to login to any other account to use the chat bar at the bottom of the page if you don’t want to. If you do, then you can add your meebo/AIM/GTalk/etc account and all your friends are right there.
I’m interested to see how the solutions end up competing from a revenue sharing perspective.
Whoever does a better job of selling out their inventory across their extended networks will end up winning the larger integrations.
AOL already has a large network of sites to sell inventory for. I may be wrong, but I think they’ll be less likely to fill a decent percent of the inventory from their non-AOL integrators, given the current trends of the web ad sales.
Too little too late in my opinion
Too little too late in my opinion
It’s really hard to see how anyone, Google included, can compete with FB Connect.
socialthing.com is quite possibly an $800 million dollar company on the cusp of the globalist web 2.0 revolution. http://iamned.com/blog/ no recession