Introducing SocialThing, the latest in social-media site aggregators.
It’s still in beta mode, but as of 12:45pm EST the invite code: “techcrunch” still worked.

Interesting site. Instead of just asking for the location of all of your public feeds like FriendFeed does, it actually has you enter in your login and password to each of the social sites it pulls information from. This is what makes SocialThing different than FriendFeed (and other similar services) – It uses the various API’s, including OAuth with each site so that you can interact with the various feeds as if you were on the site itself. For example, If someone were to send me a message via twitter, I wouldn’t have to leave SocialThing’s site in order to respond. The same goes for the rest of the sites they currently aggregate (Facebook, Pownce, Twitter, Flickr, LiveJournal, and Vimeo).

The purpose of the site is to “Get your digital life together.” And once they start adding more social sites, this should kick services like friendfeed in the rear as it will allow you to actually use this site as a one-stop-shop for your social-networking needs, whereas other social aggregators tend to be just pretty representations of all your RSS feeds. Needless to say this could turn out to be a very useful tool, especially if they were to create some sort of application that could interactive with it (perhaps using Adobe AIR?), a la what twitter + pownce have done.

Taken from their site, it allows you to:
“See everything that’s going on with your friends in all the sites you use, easily figure out where you’re missing connections with your friends, interact with multiple sites at once, and more!

Socialthing! makes it easy to see all the things your friends are doing. It’s a news feed for every site that you use in one place.”

Now lets just see if this thing can actually take off, it seems like every day a new social-feed aggregator is released….I guess that goes to show you how its never good to be first in the sandbox… all it means is that the next killer app to come out in your genre will just incorporate all your positive innovations and most likely learn from your mistakes.

From personal observations, I’ve noticed that only a select crowd use their own custom RSS News Aggregator (a la Google Reader), or even social bookmarking services like del.icio.us. That positions this site as a convenient alternative to having to rely on iGoogle or a “customized” Yahoo! homepage. With those the user would have to already know which feeds he or she was interested in vieweing, whereas here the average internet user would be able to explore not only the sites they typically frequent, but would also be given the opportunity to discover a whole new realm of similar content. With that in mind, I applaud the trio for creating this news-portal, the only catch is whether or not they will be able to create enough “buzz” about the site to draw that targeted user demographic away from their most likely “widgetized” homepage. Hopefully posts like this will help the cause. I look forward to seeing how it evolves over the next year. Good luck guys!

For more information on Alltop, check-out this great post on the evolution blog featuring an interview with Mr. Kawasaki himself, or just go read what they have to say about themselves via their about page – alltop.com/about/