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:

This post has been a long time coming and we’re very excited to say that we’re in the last few days of being acquired by AOL. There’s so many questions that I know everyone is asking, so I was hoping to answer a decent amount of them here. Also, you are more than welcome to jump in and toss your comments our way; we will do everything to get your questions answered.

One thing I want to note before I really go into anything else was what this meant to us. Obviously there’s a part of it that’s just simply nice to say that we (as entrepreneurs, engineers and novices to the internet startup game) have had a success. Being acquired at such an early stage is a pretty good validation that we are onto something really hot. But beyond all of that, at the end of the day, we just wanted do something that was both beneficial to us, and our users. On one hand that may have meant raising more money, continuing down the path we were going down and just cranking away at the product we’ve worked on for more than a year now. But the other opportunity was being able to jump right into a big company, not have the worry of raising money, have the infrastructure and servers to be able to scale to a much larger audience than before, and most of all, have the freedom to make a much better experience for our users.

I know the biggest question asked will be “So what happens to Socialthing! now?” so I thought I’d get that out of the way first:

While for some time we’ll be cranking away on improving our back end to improve stability and scalability, we’re wanting to keep the experience much of the same way that it is today. We’ll continue to work on Socialthing! …developing new features, integrating more services and building a better back end.

But with these kinds of acquisitions come some really cool opportunities. Specifically speaking, we have a really cool opportunity ahead of us to integrate into some other AOL products that might change the way you see social aggregation. AIM is a really big target for us, both on the aggregation and on the publishing side, so you can imagine how excited we are to be able to work along side the team.

There’s going to be a whole lot more about what we’re up to soon…but for now…let us know your questions! We’d love to hear them!

We’ve got so many people to thank, so I’m just going to toss in the obligatory “acceptance speech” list here:

TechStars for giving us the most amazing opportunity. They saw something special in us and gave us the opportunity we needed to really building something cool. Also, a special thanks to all the TechStars teams for all of your support…

Jason Mendelson. This guy is amazing. The day that we met him, he told us he didn’t believe in what we were doing, didn’t think it’d go anywhere, and we were going to have to prove him wrong. And prove him wrong, we did indeed. Jason is one of the managing partners over at the Boulder-based venture capital firm, Foundry Group. He was one of our early mentors, and now one of our biggest cheerleaders. It’s been an absolute pleasure being able to work with him.

eonBusiness for helping us out with our first investment round. From the first day that we met eon, we knew that they were the right kind of partner for us to work with for investment. Dave and Rob were both incredibly knowledgeable about the business aspects, while Frank acted as a mentor to our development team…helping us through scaling issues and more.

Robert Reich and the Denver/Boulder New Tech Meetup for being such a cornerstone in building the Boulder tech community up to where it is today. When we presented for the first time in August of 2007, there was only about 100 people in the room, but just last week we saw such an incredible turnout that more than 50 people had standing room only.

Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado for giving us an opportunity to give back to the community that made us who we are. Earlier this year, we pledged 1% of our equity to the EFCo so that we might be able to have a direct hand in building a better, stronger entrepreneurial community.

Frank Gruber for providing so many companies with the opportunity to show their stuff to the locals. Frank runs TechCocktail, a shindig where a bunch of geeks show up, show their stuff, and get their drink on.

Dave Morin for being a personal mentor to me, as well as an incredible mind to tap when we just needed someone to bounce ideas off of.

All of our partners that we work with on a regular basis for integration…because without them, Socialthing! wouldn’t exist. We’ve loved working with companies like Facebook, Twitter and the many others that deserve our praise.

And of course, last but not least… AOL. While we’ve seen some dark years in the AOL universe, the company that we got acquired by is a very different company than they were those years ago. We’re so excited about the opportunity that we have in front of us, as well as very happy that someone saw in Socialthing! what has made us excited for so long.

There’s so many people that I’m sure we’re missing here, but without a doubt, we’d also like to thank our friends, family and everyone else who has helped us along the way.

While the journey now ends for the company known as Socialthing, Inc., the journey has just started for Socialthing! and the many other products we intend to give the “Socialthing! touch” to inside of AOL. We’re excited to have this opportunity and can’t wait to show AOL and the world what we’re made of. Thanks to everyone.

Ping.fm
We added Ping.fm support so that you can post to your Ping.fm account (and all the accounts you have it configured with) right from the Socialthing! posting interface. Check out their blog post about it Here. If you don’t have an invite to Ping.fm, you can sign up there with the invite code, “socialthing”.

Color Coating
In an effort to make Socialthing! easier to read and digest, we have added the ability to change the color of the bar in which your friends’ names appear. Just click on the color swatch icon, pick a color, and voila!

Contact Management
Ah, the return of old features killed off by 2.0. One thing that was popular in the previous release was the ability to rename contacts, and thus, combine their various social media accounts into one within the Socialthing! interface. We quickly realized, however, that the interface for doing this was very poor…so we spent some time on revising it, and eventually came up with something much better.

While contacts that are already a part of Socialthing! will be combined for you, other contacts without a Socialthing! account can be managed by clicking the little arrow at the far right corner of their title bar. From there, you can click “Manage Contact” and then away you go!

Going forward, we plan to continue to release more features, and more importantly, services. We have been working hard on the back end to be able to support more services, as well as developing the ability to integrate many services quickly. We hope you like these features and as always, let us know what you think about them either by leaving a comment here, or by commenting over at our Satisfaction page.

And that’s too bad. It’s too bad because Socialthing! is a cool product, and there are some cool people working on it. It’s exciting stuff, and they’re exciting people. It deserves more attention, and they deserve more pub. I’ll do my best to give both their due.

So… stay tuned here to see some good stuff. Some good stuff about why Socialthing! exists, and why Socialthing! rocks (because it does). In the meantime, make sure you’re following Socialthing! on twitter (@socialthing), and if you aren’t already, make sure you’re following me on twitter (@brianlburns).

See you around!

We’re for sure excited to have this functionality back in, as it was one of our favorite features before 2.0. Hope you enjoy it!

New services:

Brightkite - A really awesome service where you share your location with your friends. Our integration means that you’ll be able to see what your friends are posting, where they’re checking in, and the notes they’re writing. Soon you’ll be able to post to Brightkite, as well as post comments on items.

Plurk - All the rage with the Twitterati, Plurk is a service that adds a few new flavors to the microblogging genre. Horizontal timeline scrolling, emotions, etc. are just a few of the niceties about it. As soon as Plurk offers an API, we’ll be able to post new Plurk messages back and view friends Plurks. Until then, we hope you at least enjoy publishing your Plurk status in your personal profile!

Seesmic - With a CEO like Loic LeMeur how could your service not be the bees knees? Seesmic is like Twitter, but for video…post a short video and create a conversation around it! Seesmic’s integration means that we can show you all of your friends’ stuff (even their private replies) and publish your own videos on your profile too. You can even reply to other videos right within their player!

Guitar Hero - Alright, I’ve been excited about this one forever. It’s easy…just integrate your console (XBOX360, PS3 or Wii) into the Guitar Hero site, then tell us your User ID and we’ll publish how well you’ve been doing lately on your tunes. Stats include star rating, percentage, oh, and what song you played in the first place. This has been a lot of fun to test internally (IE …just playing a lot of Guitar Hero under the guise of work).

New features:

We’ve added a few new keyboard shortcuts:
M - Me (your profile)
J - Previous tab
K - Next tab
C - Close current tab

There’s a new indication whenever you’re looking at new items versus stuff you may have seen before. Basically we add a yellow background color to “new” stuff. But this is a work in progress…meaning please tell us if you don’t like it…and give us a better idea!

We’ve changed around the Services page just a bit. We’ve now added icons indicating what kinds of things we do with the various accounts you’re adding. If you see then that means we’ll probably be bringing in YOUR activities. If you see then we’ve got your friends’ updates and last, means that you’re going to be able to post stuff to that service. In addition to this, we’re also clarifying any time that we’re needing to ask for your password. Definitely not something we want to do, but it’s a necessary thing for some parts of our app to work.

We really hope you like all the new additions, and very soon we’ll be adding all kinds of new stuff…new services, features, etc!

But since we’re committed to bringing you all kinds of new updates, we threw in something that makes Socialthing! work just a bit more like a desktop app: Keyboard Shortcuts.

It’s pretty simple…the idea was that you can navigate through Socialthing! without your mouse…or at least navigate a good amount of it. Basically when you have ST! open, you just hit the corresponding key on your keyboard. So without further adieu, here they are:

H - Home
P - Post
S - Settings
V - Vote

If our auto-update notification pops up to tell you that you have new updates from some networks, you can hit “E” and that will activate the “See them”

If you have the Post window open (like if you clicked on it, or hit P to bring it open), you can hit ESC and it will close that window. (NOTE: This feature doesn’t work in Safari if you’re typing something in the text box, if you want to close, type Tab then ESC)

Also, when you have the post window open, you’re able to use Tab to go straight to the “Post” button, so that you can click Tab then Enter after you’re done typing, and post something right up. If you want to select or deselect any networks that you’re posting to, you can just keep hitting Tab, then Space to check/uncheck the boxes. (NOTE: If you’re trying to do this in Safari on the Mac, you’ll need to go to System Preferences, Keyboard & Mouse, Keyboard Shortcuts and then at the bottom, make sure “All Controls” is selected).

We’ve got a few more keyboard shortcuts that we’ll be adding in next week, along with some very exciting features, so stay tuned!

The centerpiece of our update today is expanded support for making Socialthing! into a Fluid App. Making ST! more compatible with some of the advanced features of Fluid means that we’re able to make it feel even more like a desktop app. (Oh, and if you need an icon for your ST! Fluid app, check out our blog post.)

First off, we added support for “dock badges” which means that whenever new updates come in (since we’re auto-refreshing now), we notify you on the dock. See example below:

We also built in support for Growl, the Mac OS X system-wide notification system that shows pop-ups whenever stuff happens. We’ve made it so that if you have your Socialthing! Fluid app open, when we auto-update, we tell you how many new updates are there, as well as what services they’re coming from. We’ve been testing it for a while now, and it’s working very well…check out the example below…

Among the new features, we tossed in a few fixes here and there. Now, when you go to “post” to your social networks, we remember which ones you last posted to, and pre-select those only. Next week will be another big week for us…full of new services, features, and fixes.

We’re hoping you’re enjoying the 2.0 so far!

1.0 was set up in a manner so that whenever you come to our site, we fetched your friends, their data, as well as your data in a live fashion. This made for real-time updates from those sites, but unfortunately also meant that if the service was down in real-time, so was our ability to pull those updates.

We’ve now completely re-written the way that we call sites, and now everything is done throughout the day. Whenever you log into the site, you’ll see a backlog of stuff that’s already occurred…and as you’re sitting on the site, we go out and look for new updates from your sites, then as soon as we have them, deliver them without the need of your refreshing the page. A picture of this is below…

Auto-updating

While you’re sitting on the site, we go and look for new updates from you and your friends. We’re updating everything every 1 minute, so you stay constantly up to date with the sites and services you’ve configured into your Socialthing! account.

De-duplication

With all kinds of new posting tools like Ping.fm and Hellotxt (well, and Socialthing!), it’s kind of annoying when you see something coming from Twitter, and then Facebook and then Pownce. We’ve built in de-duplication for this stuff…so now you simply see the icons of the services that the update went out on, instead of duplicates of the update.

Replying and Pownce Conversations

Now it’s even easier to reply to messages from your friends, as we pop up the reply directly within the update. You’re even able to see existing conversations going on at the service right from within Socialthing!

Keeping people “quiet”

If there’s someone that likes to tweet a lot, we give you the ability to keep their updates stuck together, then how many you want to see before we start hiding updates. However, if we ARE hiding updates, you’re able to see where they’re coming from.

Advanced Friendstream Sorting

You’re able to keep your friendstream sorted in two different ways. Obviously we give you the ability to sort by “time” which means it will be in a purely chronological fashion. But we also give you the ability to sort your friendstream by person, which means that we are going to group the updates from them into one big batch. Then you can tell us how much time in between those updates you’re going to allow before we group… You’re even able to tell us how many updates you want us to show before we start hiding them (like two pictures above).

Using existing avatars

When we pull your accounts in, you’re able to tell us which site you want us to pull your avatar from. This makes it easy to update your “profile picture” on our site without really having to do all the work to actually upload anything to us. With this interface, you’re able to quickly switch between icons as well.

User Profiles

We’ve added user profiles. You’re able to expose the accounts that you’ve set up in Socialthing! to a public profile. This profile will be at a URL like http://USERNAME.socialthing.com. You can check out an example profile at http://indiekid.socialthing.com.

Sharing stuff with your profile

We’ve got new privacy functions inside of Socialthing! on a per-account level. You’re able to tell us what accounts you want seen as part of your public profile, as well as WHO sees them.

Favoriting

You’re now able to mark something in the Friendstream (or your own Lifestream) as a favorite. Right now this favorite just stays on Socialthing!, but we’re adding the ability to send those favorites back to the service that the update came from very soon…

Updated posting

This one was pretty requested…we made it so that you can post an update without going to a separate page altogether…just comes up as a popup now.

New iPhone Version

There’s also a brand new version of our iPhone web app. It now allows you to favorite, reply and read more stuff than you could before. It also is pretty optimized for EDGE now and should load much quicker than before.

Re-adding services
We have brought back del.icio.us, Digg, Last.fm and YouTube. We’re also working really hard at bringing you lots of new services in a really fast manner. We’ve got quite a few in the pipeline.

Even more coming!
We’re not done at all. We’ve been working on tons of other sweet features recently and have them ready to go, we’re just going to release them over time so you’re not really overwhelmed with everything. There’s a lot of great ideas that have been suggested by our users that have made it into the app, into upcoming features.

We hope you really enjoy 2.0 as much as we do and can’t wait to get you even more new things!