SocialThing and FriendFeed
Brewed on May 24th, 2008 by Troy Meyer
There have been two tools come out recently that take some of your accounts throughout the web and put them all in one place for you to easily peruse or share. If you are like me, you have many different tools you have signed up for on the Internet and your biggest problem is just keeping track of them all. SocialThing and FriendFeed can help.
About SocialThing
SocialThing is currently in a private beta stage of development. It takes your accounts from around the web and puts status updates and notifications on one “Lifestream” where you can review what all of your friends are doing, without them needing to create an account. The updates and notifications you would receive through Twitter or Facebook are shown in your Lifestream as they occur.
Services
Currently SocialThing supports Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, LiveJournal, Pownce and Vimeo. It isn’t an exhaustive list of tools, but there are plans to support more in the future such as Picasa Web Albums, Google Reader, StumbleUpon and many more. I like the way that they approach development on SocialThing; they present the users with a list of tools that they would like included and allow them to vote on which to get first.
About FriendFeed
FriendFeed is gaining a lot of popularity throughout the web, mostly starting with the blogging crowd. Until just recently FriendFeed’s focus has been more of an update tool to be able to let friends know what you have been doing around the web. The interaction using FriendFeed has so far been limited for myself. I join these new services everytime they crop up, but I can never convince my friends to do the same. FriendFeed is a great way to share what I am doing, but there is no community aspect to it if you don’t have any friends on FriendFeed.
Services
FriendFeed provides the option to link to a lot more tools than SocialThing curently offers, such as Last.fm, YouTube, del.icio.us as well as the services that SocialThing offer and many more.
FriendFeed just changed the way I use it by adding a “Rooms” feature where FriendFeed users can come together to share items and have discussions. It is an interesting new feature that adds a lot of social flavor to the system, but I wonder how many of these social networking sites I can be involved in fully.
The Verdict
I really see FriendFeed and SocialThing as two different tools. FriendFeed is a great way to share what you’re doing with others throughout all of your accounts on the web, but SocialThing is a great way to get updates from your friends’ accounts throughout the web without having to have them join a new service.
I usually peruse my SocialThing page in the morning to see what is new with my friends on Facebook and Twitter but I rarely even visit my FriendFeed page because most of what I see posted there I have already subscribed to in Google Reader or read on Twitter. With the new “Rooms” feature I can see myself getting more involved in what others are sharing and discussing.
Check them both out! I have 11 beta invites for SocialThing currently and would love to send one to you if you are interested. Drop me a line in the comments to request an invite.
![[del.icio.us]](http://images.del.icio.us/static/img/delicious.small.gif){kind=small}
Tags: Twitter
Added this comment on June 2nd, 2008 at 9:46 pm
Trey, thanks for the mention! While we definitely understand the concern of not having a whole lot of services right now, we do greatly appreciate your comments on how we’re different. We really feel like the aggregation of all your friends into one interface, without the need for them to be a member is an absolutely important component of what we do.
We’re preparing to release our version 2.0, which will account for a very major update to how things have been working thus far. It’s easier to use, navigate, and caches everything, so it’s much more reliable. We’ll also be adding a whole lot more services in a shorter period of time.
Hope that addresses some of your concerns, and that you stay on as a continued user of our site!
Thanks a lot!
Added this comment on June 2nd, 2008 at 10:59 pm
Thanks for stopping by Matt!
I respect the way you have been approaching development of SocialThing, it appears to be very calculated and stable. I don’t mind waiting for something that works out of the box and continues working as the user base grows.
I am definitely excited to see the new features in the 2.0 release and the addition of some more services!
Added this comment on June 3rd, 2008 at 8:52 am
Thanks Trey…one of the biggest focuses of the 2.0 was constant iteration. We needed to re-build the platform so that we could always deliver fresh stuff…new services, new features, etc. We’ve successfully done that, and when we get 2.0 out there, you’ll see a litany of new features in there…
Hope you like them!
PS…thanks for the tweet!