Ping.fm has been the answer to many users’ prayers when looking for a way to keep up with friends on all of the different microblogging platforms that exist today. Essentially, asks for your data on each network and platform you use, then allows you to mass broadcast your status updates or messages across each of the platforms.

Socialthing focuses more on the aggregation side of microblogging and less on the publishing aspect (though it is possible to post replies to certain services from within their application).

Socialthing for Aggregating, Ping.fm for Posting

With the recent integration of Ping.fm into their list of services, now users can watch what is happening on each network with Socialthing AND use Ping.fm to publish messages across all of those places, all from the same window.

The Ping.fm team had backed themselves up against a wall by only allowing users to publish and not to respond to conversations, but partnering with Socialthing is a great step to bring them into the microblogging process full circle.

Check out the Socialthing blog and the Ping.fm blog to see what each had to say about the collaboration between their two products.

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.