So it’s been a week so I’ve updated the blog. A lot has happened…and that’s an understatement.

Last week we launched our private beta and so far it seems to have stirred up quite the buzz. We’re happy, excited and humbled all at the same time. I’d love to post a link to all of the blogs that talked about us and give them thanks, but I’ll just say “thanks everyone” instead.

So enough with the past, let’s talk about the present and future.

We have been experiencing some growing pains for sure. Not necessarily with scaling, but rather, with some services (specifically del.icio.us, Digg, Last.fm and YouTube). We were calling them entirely too much, causing us to have to back off and temporarily disable them. We have made some temporary fixes to be able to put these back in, but they may run in slightly limited function until we get our big architecture rewrite up and running. Other than that, the site has been running pretty smoothly. However, last night we ran into an issue that we’re still investigating. It has caused us to be down for a few hours unfortunately, but that’s what being beta is all about. It’s too bad that we have to be down for those that are relying on the service right now, but at the same time, it’s better to learn about things now than when we have more functionality and more users and they’re relying on us just that much more. Once we’re back up and running it’ll be another fix under our belt that will help us in the future.

So while we’re on the subject of the future, let’s talk about that for a moment. We’re working very hard on bringing you a lot of things. New features, tons of new services, etc. Everyone has been clamoring for something different…specific new services, status message updates to Facebook, etc. Well I can tell you a few things. We have a very extensive roadmap with a ton of great features that all play into the premise that we’re a “digital life manager”. Right now we’re working on the most mission critical pieces of that. There’s some things that we’re releasing soon that will be pretty significant. One thing in particular will allow you to “collapse your social graph”. More on what that means when the feature gets released.

Beyond that, I don’t want to speak too much into the “future” releases, because that’s half of what makes them exciting, but we do have plans in the short term to “finish” the iPhone application (in the meantime, you can send your iPhone to http://socialthing.com/iphone to see the work in progress), as well as continue working on our API.

The site will be up and running shortly we’ll let you know just as soon as our new features are released…this is an exciting time for us, and I can’t for you to see what we have up our sleeves!

Last night we discovered a bug that’s causing the site to be inoperable for a few people. We’re working on getting this fixed and will let you know just as soon as it’s working again. This is limited to just a few people, hopefully you’re not one of the “lucky” ones.

The thing about private betas is that sometimes we’re bound to go “down”…this helps us to discover flaws in our architecture, so that when we go public in a few months, we’ll have them ironed out and the chances of us having these kinds of problems are fewer and further between.

We’ll let you know when we’re back up shortly

[UPDATE] We have temporarily disabled a couple of services from displaying during this heavy time. We’re working out ways to turn them back on and will let you know just as soon as that happens.

So as most of you already know, we hit TechCrunch this morning and had an incredible writeup. Turns out when that happens, your traffic spikes like you wouldn’t believe.

Turns out also, that when you give out 10 invites to every person that signs up, they tend to blast everyone about it and invite all their friends. So with all of that, we have a few issues that have come up.

We are temporarily scaling back our updating time to only every 15 minutes. It should only be like this for a while…during this insane influx.

We are also temporarily disabling new users from having invites. As much as we’d like to let you blast it to all of your friends, for the sake of our servers, and your user experience at the moment, we have to slow it down just ever so slightly. We’ll let you know when the invites are back up.

You might also see our maintenance page get thrown up every once in a while. Please bear with us, we’re working hard on making sure everything runs smoothly. We know you want to get in and play.

More updates as they come.

Thanks everyone! Hope you’re having a good experience so far, and please let us know if you are having issues, or have ideas.

So I want to clarify a ton of things in wake of the TechCrunch post.

1. Socialthing! is not FriendFeed, and FriendFeed is not Socialthing!

This one is a question we always get: How are you different from FriendFeed? And how do we respond? Usually with one common answer: We have very different value propositions, and right now are being compared to each other because of a surface understanding of what we do. Socialthing! is and always has been about making your digital life easier. We bring your friends into one interface, make it easy to post stuff back to the networks, and just in general, try to make social networking easier. FriendFeed is about creating an interesting conversation around content (at least that’s our take on it). Two very different, very equally as cool value props. To us, the idea behind FriendFeed is not dissimilar to a forum. With forums, you have threads and then replies to those threads. With FriendFeed, the threads would be user generated content and replies being the comments and “likes” around that content.

2. We ask you for passwords because rather than just grabbing feeds, we are working with the various APIs that exist. This is beneficial because then it allows us to aggregate things that feeds otherwise wouldn’t provide: private data, friend lists, etc. When you sign up for Socialthing! you may notice a different experience signing in to your del.icio.us versus your Facebook account. This is because Facebook’s API allows for what is called token-based authentication. To put it easy, when you want to use Socialthing!, Facebook gives us a “secret token” that allows us to work with the data in your account, without you having to give us your username and password.

This is something that we whole-heartedly believe in. We’re working hard on encouraging the services that we’ve implemented to at least explore the possibility of using token-based authentication (including OAuth, a project led by a few friends of ours). Soon, one of our engineers will be writing a post as to the security of the passwords that you’re entering into our service.

3. Roadmap

We have an unbelievable amount of stuff planned for this thing. If you can imagine a single place that you can go to where you manage all of your accounts, the content, your friendships, etc…this is our goal. Right now, we knowingly have a slightly more limited feature and services set. But for good reason.

First off, we want to have a great user experience. This is why services like Tumblr and Jaiku aren’t in there is because of the issue with duplication. If you’re following the same person on Tumblr as you are on Twitter, and they happen to have their Twitter posting to their Tumblr (I know, pretty confusing right?), then it can create duplicate content. As a user, if you saw the same exact update in two different places from two different services, would it be confusing? Would it be annoying? These are questions we thought long and hard about and that’s why we took the route we did. We are working on the de-duplication of services like this and will have them to you as soon as possible.

Secondly, we’re working hard on new ways of connecting you to friends you’ve already got. For instance, coming (very) soon is the ability to see the things your friends are doing, even if you’re not a part of that service. The idea is that if you’re a friend with someone on Twitter, and they have their settings such that “friends on any service” can see their various updates, then you might see their Digg stories, even if you’re not a part of Digg.

Really, to sum it all up, we know that the number of our services is lacking, and is behind that of our “competitors”, but that’s changing very soon. We’ll be integrating a good number of services very quickly here…

Ok, so as a side note…I am posting this at 5:50am Central Time in Austin, TX during the amazing SXSW Interactive Festival. We got home from our big party about an hour ago…great time with a lot of great people… Totally stoked about that. AND really happy to see some great feedback coming through (at the party, through comments on TechCrunch, Satisfaction, etc.). Expect more updates from SXSW. Until then, hope you enjoy Socialthing!

PS. Please please please give us all of your feedback. http://getsatisfaction.com/socialthing or email us at feedback AT socialthing DOT com

Just wanted to drop in and let everyone know that in the next 24 hours the site may be going down some. We’ll just pop up the maintenance page and you’ll know, but basically we have got a lot of things to get ready to prepare us for tomorrow (our big launch day).

We’ve got a new server, some great new features and some new architecture (for stability) going up throughout this period, so please, bear with us and it will all be much better soon.

Thanks everyone!