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SocialThing: Looking to Take Over the Social Web

There are many out there attempting to rule the face of social web and provide an answer to the time consuming-ness of being social on the internet. Names such as Google, Facebook, and FriendFeed have been at the forefront lately. Enter stage left…SocialThing, the newest contender to facilitate being social online.

SocialThing is similar to FriendFeed in that you are able to link multiple social accounts through one application…whether web based or installed. Having gone into beta just three short months ago, the web is a twitter with all the talk about SocialThing. Getting into the beta at this point seems almost impossible as we have been trying for a month now.

SocialThing Features

The key feature that separates SocialThing from others like FriendFeed is the way it finds and follows your friends. With FriendFeed, you are required to do work to put together the list. SocialThing takes the work out of it. Much the way MyBlogLog automatically finds your friends for you…so does SocialThing.

This may not seem to big a deal, but if you have a large amount of friends it eliminates tons of time. If you use Facebook Connect to transport your credentials — which is all you need to enter in SocialThing to find your friends — your life is even easier. Here’s the kicker. When you add friends on your accounts…you don’t have to re-find or add anything. It does it for you when they are added!

The SocialThing Setup

There are a set of three tabs on the right on when you login to SocialThing and a lifestream button on the left.

• Settings Tab – This is where you determine your lifestream settings and more. It also has the accounts you can register located here. They include — and the list is going to grow leaps and bounds: Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo, Flickr, Pownce and LiveJournal.
• Vote Tab - While in beta they also have a huge list of services to vote on to be added. These include: Del.Icio.Us, Digg, Last.FM, Myspace, and YouTube.
• Post Tab – Self-explanatory…this is where you post items. You can choose how the posts are delivered and to what accounts.
• Lifestream Button -Much like other services, the lifestream button is where you see your updates from your social sites. That includes all your friends activity from across all your registered social accounts.

Some Uses of SocialThing

• Use Fluid or Prism to create desktop apps of SocialThing – These are services that are site-specific browsers. They create small desktop apps out of single webpages so you can access them without opening your browser.
• Use with Facebook Connect to ensure ease of registering – With Facebook Connect’s data portability and the way it takes your credentials around the web…registering all your social sites can now be a breeze.

It’s not hard to see why people across the web are talking about SocialThing. Even with some discouraging comments from sources like ReadWriteWeb.com like, “Social media will continue to escalate for the foreseeable future, but it will become increasingly unlikely that you’ll have accounts for every service out there.
With FriendFeed, you don’t have to, because of its network of networks, you can just coast along with the few accounts you’re comfortable with, but still have access to friendly content across the board. This is the true innovation and it’s the reason users will adopt FriendFeed over an RSS wrapper like SocialThing!.”

Version for the iPhone

It appears that SocialThing is also available for the iPhone. Yesterday Six Apart announced BlogIt for the iPhone — a very similar application.

To learn more about the functionality in SocialThing head over to their website and read today’s blog entry describing all the new capabilities in Version 2.0 — just released. Also, let us know what you think of this social app — will it rival Facebook and FriendFeed?