So it’s been a little while since we announced the acquisition…and most likely, you might be wondering to yourself what is going on with SocialThing. Well, first off you might have noticed that I didn’t type a “!” there after “SocialThing” but I’ll get to that in a bit…
Since the acquisition we’ve been busy, very busy. There’s a lot planned for SocialThing and that’s most of why I wanted to come in here and assure everyone that we’re A-OK and ready to rock!
First off, SocialThing is here to stay. AOL has loved what we’ve done with the site, and the recognize that it’s a powerful tool, thus they don’t want to take that away from everyone. But the bigger thing is, how do we make it better/bigger/awesomer?
Pretty simple…newer, more badass website, iPhone app, desktop app, API, you name it. There’s a whole lot on the roadmap …we’re crazy excited and ready to crank! Obviously these things will take time, so there’s no target dates for any of this stuff, but we’re definitely not floundering as a result of the acquisition. Quite the opposite, actually…our resolve has never been better! We’ve heard all of your suggestions loud and clear and we’re going to do everything we can to incorporate them into the next revisions an altogether new version. Most importantly, we’re going to continue to iterate and provide new services, so rest assured, we’re here to stay!
All that being said, SocialThing is about to go through an evolution of the brand. We’ve loved SocialThing from the beginning, but we’re ready to take it further. We’re ready to take it out of the “twitterati” and into the mainstream. We’re ready to “grow up” and with that, revising the brand was super-important. So here’s the explanation:
The exclamation is gone. Gone, finito, bye-bye, etc. We were fond of it, but truth be told, it was pretentious. Oh yeah and it was kind of annoying to type “!” after every single time we said SocialThing. Also, I guess we’ll write it “SocialThing” from now on…simply because that seemed to be the most well-adopted way to “spell our name”.
But once we got rid of the exclamation point, unfortunately it seemed a bit plain. Not to mention the fact that the whole “speech bubble” thing has been a little overdone. Um…way over done. So let’s get rid of that! Oh yeah, and the text seems to be really heavy on the right side (read:bold). Last, the box around the words seems pretty huge, so let’s tighten things up a bit…
And there we had it…but hmm…it started to get really too plain. It wasn’t unique anymore, there wasn’t any flair, no excitement. So we started working on something altogether new.
We wanted to convey the excitement of SocialThing without the “!”. We wanted to be colorful without the typical “web 2.0” gradient. We wanted to be bubbly without having a speech bubble logo. So how do you convey all of that into a logo without being crazy busy?
So we ended up with:
Voila!
PS …the “lines of awesome” (as coined by Bebo engineer, Steve Cohen) aren’t going to be there all the time, just here…to…convey awesome.
The new logo is everything we wanted:
Exciting without the “!”, colorful without being overpowering, it allows itself to be any color and still work, it does everything we were looking for. Beyond that, we feel like it’s a solidly unique logo. It’s much more “summer blockbuster movie” than “web 2.0”, and we, for one, like that! Finally, it works better big, small, any size in between. It leads itself to working practically anywhere, and seeing as how you might start seeing “Powered by SocialThing” in the near future, it needed to be that for us.
We hope you like it, and if you’ve got any feedback on it at all, please let us know!
UPDATE: Some folks wanted to see a little less “Wham! Laundry Detergent-esque” version…here’s a flat black version:
