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.

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If you want to take a peek at how AOL plans to take on Facebook, you need to look beyond Bebo (the social network it bought for $850 million last year) to theBoot, a country music site hidden away off in a corner of AOL Music. A very interesting experiment is going on at theBoot that represents a major plank in AOL’s social-networking strategy. It shows how AOL plans to take on Facebook Connect, which is Facebook’s way of letting other Websites tap into its members and their activity streams.

AOL is adding its own twist to spreading activity streams across the Web through a combination of its SocialThing lifestreaming service (which it bought last year and was recently rolled out inside of Bebo) and AIM chat. It is called Socialthing for Websites.

When you visit theBoot, you will see a thin toolbar along the bottom that is labeled Socialthing on the bottom left (think of it as FriendFeed) and on the bottom right it invites you to sign in using an AIM account. (Yes, that is yet another frame). Once you sign in, your AIM username and password becomes your username and password for the site, just like Facebook Connect extends Facebook IDs to other sites. OAuth and OpenID options are planned for the near future.

Next to the Socialthing icon on the toolbar is a prominent gear icon for privacy settings and an “Updates” tab. You can choose to always share your activity on the site, never share it, or always be asked before sharing. When you click on Updates, a window pops up showing you “Site Updates” and “Buddy Updates.” The site updates is a stream of new stories and comments going on right now at theBoot. You can tab over to “Buddy updates” to see status messages from people on your buddy list, as well as actions of your friends from other services including Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and StumbleUpon..

Whenever you comment on a story or take another action on the site itself, that comment appears not only in the site updates stream, but all of your buddies on AIM will see a little info icon next to your name, which if they click on will show your recent comment with a link back to the site. In other words, AOL is taking the 45 million active users of AIM and finally turning them into the underpinnings of a social network. Once you sign in with your AIM account, a couple chat tabs appear on the bottom right. You can chat with other AIM members on the site or you can have a private chat with people you know on your buddy list. (You can also invite your friends to the site that way). Part of Facebook Connect, I should note, also includes Facebook Chat, so there is overlap here. But AOL still has the advantage when it comes to chat.

The whole project is not what you’d expect to see from AOL. Maybe that is because the product is being led by Alex Bard, the founder and former CEO of Goowy, another startup AOL picked up as a small acquisition last year. It took a while, but some of that startup DNA is finally starting to rub off on the rest of AOL.

What AOL is trying to do is combine public and private message streams. You can see public streams on the Socialthing side of the toolbar and both public and private chat on the right. You can expect to see AOL roll out Socialthing for Websites across all of AOL Music, Moviefone and potentially all of the properties under its MediaGlow umbrella, which has a collective audience of 70 million unique visitors in the U.S. After AOL rolls out Socialthing for Websites to its own properties, you can bet that it will offer it to other Websites as well. The appeal would be that this is a way to socialize their sites that isn’t Facebook. It also gives them the ability to inject their content directly into consumer’s activity streams through Socialthing.

Another twist that AOL is planning on adding soon is a way to filter all of these streams of information by prioritizing which public streams you see based on who you chat with the most in private. Since AOL knows your chat history, it can move to the top the public comments, Tweets, and links to Flickr, YouTube and whatnot that come from your closest contacts—the ones you actually speak to (assuming you use AIM).

AOL is offering Socialthing to Websites for free because it could provide really valuable data on who is visiting what sites that could be used to target content and advertising in the future directly into the lifestream. AOL will have to tread carefully there, limiting sponsored updates, but that is an obvious direction.

Now all AOL has to do is refresh its AIM client to include the the lifestream from Socialthing so that users can see one unified activity stream of both public and private messages all in one place.

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We’ve received confirmation from AOL that the company has acquired Socialthing!, a lifestreaming service that competes with FriendFeed. We originally reported the deal on August 1.

AOL says that the Socialthing! team will report to SVP of AOL and GM of People Networks David Liu, and will be incorporated into its People Networks division. Socialthing’s lifestreaming will be integrated into a number of AOL’s community properties, including its social network Bebo and AIM, its popular chat service.

The acquisition comes during a tough time for AOL, which has recently been forced to institute a number of budget cuts. Despite its setbacks, AOL is still keen on keeping its valuable social properties healthy, and likely saw Socialthing! as a relatively cheap investment (the aquistion price was not released, but it was probably fairly small).

Socialthing launched only five months ago in private beta. Unlike most social news aggregators, the site employs a smart algorithm that can figure out who you’re friends with, so you don’t have to explicitly define a friends list for each service.

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We don’t know the price, but it was likely a small purchase. Socialthing! came out of Colorado-based incubator TechStars. Once you sign up to track friends activities on Socialthing!, it keeps automatically adding new friends for the services you choose to monitor. (See our review).

Despite all the turmoil and uncertainty about its future, AOL is trying to keep up with the times. It is embracing feeds, lifestreaming and even playing nice with other IM services such as Meebo and eBuddy. Maybe it is finally realizing that there is a bigger world out there than AOL.

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Update: Head over to InviteShare to help others get into Socialthing! Each user is given 10 invites to hand out.

There are a bazillion social network aggregators out there (Mike attempted to round up some of the most notable ones here). FriendFeed is the most visible of them all for two main reasons: it was founded a group of ex-Googlers and, as a consequence, benefits from a clean and easy-to-use design.

But FriendFeed’s going to have some serious competition from a TechStars startup called Socialthing!, which makes it even easier to get an overview of what your friends are doing on the web.

Socialthing! officially goes into private beta today and will let in the first 1,000 TechCrunch readers who use the invitation code “TechCrunch” to sign up (you’ll probably have to wait a few days to get your account, however). The service primarily differs from FriendFeed in the way it determines which of your friends to track. While FriendFeed actually requires users to create their own list of friends on FriendFeed, Socialthing! realizes you probably don’t want to create yet another list of your friends. So instead of asking you to do more work, it automatically detects who your friends are on the social services to which you belong.

The distinction may sound inconsequential but Socialthing!’s method actually makes things a lot easier, both for initial set up and for longer term maintenance. When you sign up for Socialthing!, you only have to provide it with your credentials to sites like Facebook and Pownce. And as time goes by, you don’t have to worry about setting up new friends on the service because it will automatically know that you’ve become friends with people elsewhere. In contrast, FriendFeed requires you to both explicitly designate friends during the initial configuration (either one-by-one or through Facebook/Gmail importing) and manually add new friends over time.

Another benefit Socialthing! has over FriendFeed is its focus on allowing users to send data back to social services (if you want to respond to someone’s tweet, for example, you can do so directly from Socialthing!). On the other hand, FriendFeed is all about reading data from services but not about writing it back.

While FriendFeed generally takes more effort, its approach does have unique advantages. You can follow friends of friends on FriendFeed and see updates from services that you don’t personally use, all because FriendFeed users have more independently-defined presences. FriendFeed also supports a wider range of services than Socialthing! (28 vs. 11, although Facebook updates are noticeably lacking from FriendFeed). Time, however, should narrow the gap.

In the end, whether FriendFeed succeeds more than Socialthing! will depend on whether people are looking for another community or just a way to easily track their existing ones. I suspect the latter will be the case.

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Most of these companies are unlaunched and seeking additional angel funding (exceptions are noted). Here are our notes on each – and see Don Dodge for his take:

EventVue builds social networks around conferences (see confabb, an existing competitor). The idea is to let people connect before, during and after conferences in an online space, to add to the physical interaction at the conference itself. The company plans on generating revenue by charging an affiliate fee for each new registration. They are currently looking for $150k in funding.

Intense Debate – see our previous coverage. Intense Debate is a souped-up blog commenting widget that adds a lot of features for publishers and commenters alike. Currently installed on 30 blogs. Installing the plug-in on your blog (WordPress, Blogger, and TypePad) adds threading, comment analytics, bulk comment moderation across all your blogs, user reputation, and comment aggregation. They are looking for $500k in funding.

socialthing! is an ambitious project that simplifies the management of digital content (blogs, photos, music, friends, social networks and links). Users can also synchronize information from and to various social networks from their profile page. Strong viral component. Revenue from advertising. Raising $500k.

J-Squared Media has launched their “Sticky Notes” Facebook application. It has 1.7 million users after six weeks, who have sent over 4 million sticky notes. They are working on several other related Facebook applications and are cash flow positive with $30,000/month in revenue from cost per action advertising. Not seeking funding. More here.

Search-To-Phone is a mobile search service via voice. Call and leave a voicemail asking about a product or service. The request is then routed to the appropriate business to call you back with information and/or a special offer. Built on TellMe and Gold Systems technologies for voice recognition. They’ve signed a business development deal with Excell Services to provess 10 million calls. They are looking for a small capital investment and more partners before launching.

Villij is a recommendation engine that analyzes your online life (social networks, blogs, bookmarks, etc.) to find people who may have similar interests as you. Raising $500k.

MadKast has the honor of being the first TechStars startup to launch. Our previous coverage is here. They’ve made a dead simple way to increase distribution for your blog with one line of javascript or one click for Blogger and TypePad. Once the widget is installed, readers can send a blog post via email, mobile MMS, or social bookmarking networks to friends. They are raising $300k in capital.

FiltrBox is a content monitoring and filtering service for blogs, news sites and other websites. Content is filtered by topics, keywords and context and then delivered to the user via RSS, email and/or text messages. Filters can be adjusted via sliders and will learn what you like over time. Raising $500k in capital.

KBLabs is developing Facebook applications and widgets. Wah! Cool was their first application, which launched four weeks ago. It now has 100k subscribers and is generating 1.5 million page views per week. Other applications include Post Secrets, Motivate Me and Track Bot. The founders are going back to college this Fall but will continue to consult and build Facebook applications. They are not looking for funding.

BrightKite serves location based notifications (”place streaming”) over email, instant messaging of text messages. The idea is to stream content about a place, from a place. Friends are alerted when you are nearby. You receive offers from local businesses. Etc. Targeted towards conferences, bars, parties and public places. It is also a platform for third party applications. Raising $500k in capital.

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