Suddenly, AOL Loves Lifestreaming; Buys Socialthing!
Erick Schonfeld
79 comments »
AOL is getting into the lifestreaming business. Like Friendfeed or Facebook’s News feeds, it recently launched AIM BuddyUpdates, which lets AIM users keep up with what their instant-messaging buddies are doing on social services such as Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and Digg. To beef up its lifestreaming capabilities, we have been able to confirm that it has also bought Socialthing!, a FriendFeed competitor that is still in private beta.
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.
It’s a little late but better then never. The question is if a large corporation would ever be able to start a new trend or if it always has to catch up with what independent startups do and succeed with.
hmm, wasn’t AOL just belt-tightening?
the acquisition is probably a <$5 mil transaction. no matter how cash-short they are 5mil isn’t much for AOL.
feels like AOL is late to the party, and also it bought weblogs inc. a profitable business and now is firing the staff, looks like AOL cant even manage businesses that are already profitable, no need to talk about turning not profitable yet apps into profitable ones.
This is all sales. AOL is practically blindfolded here. I’d agree with you Eric, it’s probably under 5 mil. Isn’t that what Google bought Jaiku for?
probably true.
it’s more like hiring the founders with a big signing bonus, than acquiring the technology or user base.
aol always burn money
thats what they do
Complete domination.
congrats to socialthing!!
Definitely, above all - congratulations to SocialThing. Well done fellas.
Congrats to Matt & Co at SocialThing! on the acquisition. Great job guys! That’s a huge success for you guys and for TechStars in a really short period of time.
Does that mean that you are moving out of Boulder?
“Acquisitions” of Y-Combinator and TechStars type companies are not usually 7 figure deals. It’s usually like $200,000 + a job. It’s nice but it’s nothing to rave about.
They raised $515K - This was likely a $5M deal
This is a great sign for social media. It will be mainstream. Twitter will help make it happen.
@lol I think for being such a short time from the last TechStars it’s a great thing for these guys.
Congrats SocialThing-ers! Matt, Brian and Co!
holy crap that was fast. I actually like social thing as it is a pretty easy to use lifestreaming tool. good for them!
$200,000? I think that is totally unrealistic, this has got to be $1,000,000+ plus given the space it is in, and given the cost of building something like this, they know with a big company behind it to push lifestreaming to the masses it can be big.
sent from: fav.or.it [FID944569]
AOL is just hot for Socialthing!’s back end—so tight. IMHO, the ST! front-end is a knockout as well.
It’ll be interesting to see if/how the interface changes as the service is integrated into the AOL brand.
Congratulations SocialThing folks. Screw FriendFeed and Twhirl and All other guys…U get bought u win , get the money, go on a couple of weeks vacation , get back together Friday evening for Beer and come up with new idea. Start talking about idea after couple of beers, I bet you will come up with something smart. But yes, Dont even think about doing anythin Social. Do something fundamental, Go for a long run, more creative and next time it will be Google who will buy you. All the best. Remember few things
- Fundamental + Hardware + Python/Ruby + Java server side.
Mine is still Stealth and will need creative gurus very soon. Ping me @ focksula @ yahoo.com if you guys are free to go from AOL clutches.
Congrats to Social Thing! Matt, Ben, Brian…looks like you actually *were* working hard all those late nights!
congrats Matt G and all the other socialthingers!
That is nice, but please don`t compare it with friendfeed. i think socialthing is pretty much is own “thing” (pun intended) but i guess that means we will get buddyupdates integrated to it along aimpages,etc.
Hurray Socialthing! *Boulder Represent!*
Matt, Ben, Wade & Joel way to go… keep kickin’ ass.
Congrats guys!
Congrats to Matt and the socialthing peeps. W00t for techstars and the Boulder tech scene!
congrats Matt & gang… come back to stl, and start anew
Super! Another company on my Web2.0 Stickr Board moves beyond the start-up realm. (and they were one of the newer ones
Congrats Matt, ST team, TechStars, etc.
Its about time the old dinosaur AOL starts realizing that web2.0 is real and its hear
Congrats Ben, Matt and Brian! You guys killed it. Thanks for making the Techstars brand shine. We owe you one. Drinks? Rio? Celebration?
sold too early
You guys are so lucky. I wish you great things working with AOL. It’s big news for you guys and a quick turn around. Congrats!
It’s funny, but AOL used to be the leader in this kind of stuff. Anyone remember AOL 3.0? I remember all the fuss when that came out, along with Slingo. They really had it made back then.
But in all honesty, it seems they’re trying to do a little too much. It’s always good to try something new though, it sure can be rewarding =).
Come on, Socialthing! is not a competitor to FriendFeed. Both parties AND the blogosphere has agreed that the two services provide very different and unique services.
That being said, I hope the new partnership will result in some added innovation for Socialthing!, which has remained relatively stagnant over the last few weeks. Perhaps they’ve been too busy setting up a deal than perfecting their service…
Congrats guys! Today AOL, tomorrow the world!
AOL should buy MyBlogFans, also in private beta, which is competitor to MyBlogLog.
Congrats to to Matt and the Socialthing team! Great news!
small acquisitions like this are great for Techstars and continues to show the level of talent and innovation coming out of Boulder. It stands as a testament to the hard work of MG, BB and crew, and the ability of Boulder to attract such talent.
you are a complete jack ass. testament to what? talent? really? you nee3d a beating, i’ll meet you at settler’s, 6pm.
As I see it, Opening up the IM was a good idea
what you loose in adgain you gain in other areas
who is to say that the same people who got aim wouldnt use the email or social services.
Providing providing a lifestreaming service for its users (and making their email better aka goowy) was a good move.
Now what aol should do is centralize it all
Improve the aol homepage to advertise (and render more useful) its newer services, while still allowing its other users who wont use the service to remove it off the homepage
They should also integrate openid support, because A. it would make them more interesting to yahoo with the whole yahoo and openid deal. and B. it would bring in more users depending on if they advertised the support for other accounts.
“LOL”:
Not 7 figures? How about 8 figures? http://www.techcrunch.com/2008.....p-youtube/
It looks like AOL is back in the game. In the news a lot lately.
http://blabtech.blogspot.com
This doesn’t seem to be official yet, since there is no comment from the socialthing! guys about it.
If you are interested this type of thing, you might want to check my site out FriendBinder (http://friendbinder.com) which is similar and supports RSS too.
Congratulations SocialThing!
If it is true, I tend to agree they sold too early…they had barely got their app out the door as a public beta.
Yay! I’ve known Matt Galligan since the first podcast convention in socal years ago before this all began. Even knew the site since it was a young concept known as digital soap. So proud of these guys- they deserve all the best!