A little while back I read about Socialthing and signed up for the beta as I’m intrigued to see what directions the various purveyors of lifestreams - Jaiku (very early to the game yet now MIA), FriendFeed - can take the idea. The email from Socialthing sets up the beta well and prepares the user for limited initial features but a good promise of things to come. FYI, they pull it off by taking advantage of the various APIs so you will have to give them permission to access your accounts.
After adding my services: Facebook, Del.icio.us, Twitter, Last.fm and Flickr (they also support Vimeo, LiveJournal, YoutTube and Digg) the value of the site was immediately made apparent. It presents you with a Friendstream - a lifestream aggregating all your friends’ activities on various services in one place which is very useful. I’m not sure why, but the design of Socialthing works much better for me than Friendfeed’s. Now if only they made that stream available via RSS so I could drop it into Google Reader the way I do with my various updates now. I’m certain that must be on the way.
Anyway, so far I have to say Socialthing looks very promising. I’ll post an update as more features reveal themselves.
What is the value add of these aggregation services over simply subscribing to each of the social services’ RSS feeds individually?
Right now not a ton - other than it pleasing the OCD person in you (or me) by making things more organized and being nice to be able to have one feed that you can choose to check or not, show more/less items, etc. Its my assumption that more will come out of it.
… particularly if it lets you meter the “super-contributors” to things like delicious and twitter so you’re not completely overwhelmed with one’s person’s items.
Alex, you’re very right that more will come out of it. Subscribing to all of your friends’ RSS feeds can be completely overwhelming. A service like ours allows a user to see everything on all of their networks without being overwhelming, and beyond that, some services like Facebook don’t have RSS feeds for their photos and things like that.
Now, speaking to what else we’re going to do there’s a whole lot on the roadmap but quite a few things here in just the next few weeks. Personal profiles is one, for sure…beyond that, one thing we’re really excited about is Friend Discovery, basically a feature that compares your social graphs and figures out where you’re “missing connections” …IE you’re friends with someone on Facebook but not on Flickr…we know that and we can provide you an easy way to connect those back up. We’ll also have easy ways for you to interact with the data - replying to Twitter posts, commenting on Flickr photos, Digging stories from our interface, etc.
The idea is that we become your digital life manager…a series of tools that makes it easy to keep up with and interact with what’s going on in your entire social network from one place.
Hope you enjoy the beta…anyone else that wants an invite, shoot me an email to beta@socialthing.com and mention you came from EverydayUX.
Thanks!
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