AOL To Acquire SocialthingAOL To Acquire Socialthing

AOL on Friday confirmed it will acquire Socialthing, a social media aggregation tool that's currently in private beta.

Socialthing allows users to track social networking communities, while managing activities and contacts. It provides users with updates and news feeds for multiple social networking sites. The platform is integrated with Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Flickr, and nine other social networking sites. The company was founded last year. It was backed by venture capitalists.

AOL said that it plans to incorporate Socialthing into its People Networks division, which began with AOL's recent acquisition of social networking site Bebo.

The terms of the deal with the company, from Boulder, Colo., weren't released and AOL didn't outline any resulting staff changes. Socialthing's Web site lists five employees, including founders Ben Brightwell and Matt Galligan, engineers Joel Longtine and Wade Simmons, and designer Tim Shundo.

Galligan explained that the acquisition frees the staff to focus on improvements and integration rather than fundraising.

"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," he said in his blog. "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 alongside the team."

Galligan said that AOL is a different company than it was years ago, while expressing pride and satisfaction that "someone saw in Socialthing what has made us excited for so long."