Congrats to CEO Matt Galligan and the crew at Socialthing! TechCrunch is reporting that they have been acquired by AOL!
AOL is getting into the lifestreaming business. Like Friendfeed or Facebook’s News feeds, it recently launched AIM BuddyUpdates, which lets AIM users keep up with what their instant-messaging buddies are doing on social services such as Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and Digg. To beef up its lifestreaming capabilities, we have been able to confirm that it has also bought Socialthing!, a FriendFeed competitor that is still in private beta.
I remember meeting Matt and the rest of the crew at their booth at this year’s South By Southwest (SXSW) Interactive Festival and then their party. You could right away tell that these guys were cool and that they were on to something.
After SXSW, it was great to see all the new features they pushed out and the positive press. AOL must have noticed.
I hope that them getting acquired by AOL means that they’ll be out in Virginia (by us) more often.
Have you tried Socialthing? If so, what do you think?
Oatmeal Stout - Justin Thorp's blog 
I’ve been using Socialthing a bit when I’m on my laptop (i like just having it in a tab and hitting the update button to see what’s new). I’m of mixed feelings about the acquisition — it’ll be great if they get more resources and can aggregate more sites and add Ping.fm style support for multi-site updating (not that I’m not pretty happy with Twitter, Pownce, and Facebook, but the more the merrier), but I’ll be bummed if they lose focus; it’s my favorite lifestreaming app, currently.