Socialthing, a social aggregation service from Colorado-based TechStars, has reportedly been purchased by AOL. Details and motive for the purchase are unknown, though there are many speculations.
As Pulse 2.0 points out, one of the most peculiar things about the purchase is that Socialthing was still in private beta because the company was not ready for mass roll out to the public. In fact, Socialthing just rolled out version 2.0 last month and has been slowly adding support for additional platform integration.
AOL has been working on a project of its own that is similar to Socialthing called BuddyUpdates. BuddyUpdates allows users to add account info from 14 popular sites (Twitter, Blogger, LiveJournal, Tumblr, Xanga, Flickr, Webshots, Del.icio.us, Mixx, StumbleUpon, Blip.TV, Viddler, YouTube, and MySpace) plus a number of AOL’s own properties, but the service appears to be limited to seeing lifestreaming updates from your AIM buddies only.
Maybe AOL is interested in the Socialthing interface, or maybe they want to branch out and take advantage of Socialthing’s friend-grabbing feature, hoping to convert a few more users to AOL Instant Messanger. Until we see something official on the Socialthing blog, we’ll all be left guessing.
Rob is one of the founders of Microblink. His interests include how people are using microblogs and the community growing around them.
Mike writes and edits for Microblink day-in and day-out. He is known as the marketing guy and handles most of the microblogging accounts.
Mark writes development-oriented posts as well as news items. He's not afraid to dive headfirst into technical topics for the sake of the team.