In a move that aims at strengthening AOL’s stable of social networks, the company on Friday confirmed that it has signed an agreement to acquire Socialthing!, a Boulder-based start-up that helps’ people handle the social networking sites they frequent, into its People Networks division, pending the satisfaction of certain undisclosed closing conditions.
Affirming the news that had first been leaked to TechCrunch two weeks ago, the social network service called SocialThing — which has yet to emerge from private beta — but yesterday on their blog founder and CEO Matt Galligan confirms the acquisition.
In conveying his appreciation to them he says he is thrilled but recognizes that AOL is not exactly what it used to be. None of the financial details have been released.
“While we have seen some dark years in the AOL universe, the company that we got acquired by is a very different company than they were those years ago,” he writes.
The acquisition of Socialthing, strongly indicates that AOL is attempting to become a major player in the social networking space and seeking to capitalize on some of the fads of the day. In just the past few months, AOL acquired Bebo and launched a lifestreaming initiative within AIM that has pushed the company towards a more community-driven focus.
“Being acquired at such an early stage is a pretty good validation that we are onto something really hot,” wrote SocialThing founder Galligan. “But beyond all of that, at the end of the day, we just wanted do something that was both beneficial to us, and our users.”
Socialthing has been termed a lifestreaming application that helps users to track social networking communities, while managing activities and contacts, which users may subscribe, to be pooled together and centralized on a single feed. The platform is integrated with Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Flickr, and nine other social networking sites.
As social network enthusiasts will indicate, AOL already has its own “lifestreaming” service, called FriendFeed. Like SocialThing, it tracks the events of one’s friends and provides a little stream of those activities. However, SocialThing is designed in such a way as to promote the further use of these social sites, rather than substitute for them.
Galligan said he and his associates came up with the idea for the site because they were frustrated by the way other social networking sites were operating. Galligan said he wanted to create one simple spot where users could keep track of all of their online social communities.
With this acquisition, AOL gets into the ranks of Friendfeed and Facebook, who are both in market for keeping track of anything and everything you and your friends are doing. And while that may sound a little creepy, it has become a popular trend in a world of Tweets, geo-tagging, and iPhones with built in GPS.
Galligan says that they hope to incorporate their technology into AOL’s existing instant messaging service. He further said that Socialthing! does not face much of a threat from Friendfeed and Facebook.
“In the case of FriendFeed, it is to create conversation, Facebook to be more of a tool to broadcast the things that you do on more sites than just Facebook, and Socialthing! to be a single site that you use to keep up with your other networks,” he says in a statement.
Integrating social contacts with instant messaging is a very intriguing notion, though as some may argue, the notion could conceivably be antiquated. Just last week, during SocialThing’s latest round of software updates, the group added to its long list of supported services Ping.fm, whose principal function is to simultaneously relay short messages to users of as many as 17 other social networks, including MySpace and Facebook.
“We are not really looking to compete because we do not believe that being someone’s social dashboard is really akin to creating conversation around content, ala FriendFeed.”
Galligan explained that the acquisition frees the staff to focus on improvements and integration rather than fundraising.
“We have a really cool opportunity ahead of us to integrate into some other AOL products that might change the way you see social aggregation,” he said in his blog. “AIM is a really big target for us, both on the aggregation and on the publishing side, so you can imagine how excited we are to be able to work alongside the team.”
Socialthing has sharing agreements with 14 other sites including Facebook and Twitter.
The terms of the deal with the company, from Boulder, Colo., were not released and AOL did not outline any resulting staff changes. Socialthing’s Web site lists five employees, including founders Ben Brightwell and Matt Galligan, engineers Joel Longtine and Wade Simmons, and designer Tim Shundo.
Galligan, 24, said he is happy about the deal with AOL.
“We definitely did not expect it this soon, but it is a hot market and we hoped someone would take an interest in us at some point later on,” he said.
Whether or not this means much in terms of AOL’s future, or if it is late in coming, the move is certainly in the right direction.