Blogging

Social media is coming to Warner Bros. Television Group’s online properties, thanks to a smallish AOL property called Socialthing.

A feed of members’ activity across Warner Bros. entertainment sites–TheWB.com, KidsWB.com, DC Hero Zone, MomLogic, Essence, and TheCW.com–will be displayed on their Socialthing profiles. So, if you watch a “Gossip Girl” video on TheCW.com or play a game on DC Hero Zone, it’ll show up in your feed, and you can keep tabs on what your friends are doing as well (and share bits of content with them). There will also be fictional Socialthing profiles for characters like the “Gossip Girl” cast as part of a broader promotional effort.

As some others have pointed out, it’s nice to see AOL finally showing some synergy with parent company Time Warner. You know, before it gets spun off and all.

AOL purchased Socialthing, a would-be competitor to FriendFeed, last summer and integrated it into the “People Networks” division anchored by the company’s earlier acquisition of Bebo. Last month, AOL relaunched Socialthing as “a revolutionary new platform that brings social-networking services to Web sites and enables publishers to attract new users and keep them engaged wherever they are on the Web” and announced that it would be working the service into its MediaGlow content network.

From what it sounds like, it won’t be all that different to what Viacom has been doing with its own “social platform” technology, Flux. Right now, members can log in with AOL and AIM accounts, but it’ll soon be expanded to include Facebook, Gmail, Yahoo, and OpenID credentials with the help of the various data portability tools out there.

Disclosure: The CW television network is a joint venture between Warner Bros. and CBS. CNET News is published by CBS Interactive, a unit of CBS.

Here is the original:
AOL’s Socialthing brings streaming and sharing to Warner Bros. TV

AOL’s People Networks division, formed when the company acquired Bebo, has picked up a new friend: Socialthing, a Boulder, Colo.-based start-up that aggregates social feeds from sites like Digg, Twitter, and Flickr.

The acquisition has not yet been completed, but is close to it.

No financial details have yet been released regarding the acquisition of Socialthing, which falls into the same niche as FriendFeed and is still in private beta. The company is a new one; it emerged out of Boulder’s TechStars incubator and had its official launch party at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in March–where the company instantly gained word-of-mouth buzz when the soiree was still raging past 3 a.m. The buy was first reported early this month by TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld, who speculated that it was “likely a small purchase.”

The People Networks division at AOL is headed by Joanna Shields, who was CEO of Bebo when it was acquired. Also encompassed in the group are AOL’s two instant-messaging services, AIM and ICQ, and acquisitions Goowy and Yedda.

Getting bought was probably a good move for Socialthing. In recent months, Facebook has started to institute feed activity from other sites in its members’ news feeds, creating a potential threat to standalone aggregator services.

Read more:
Confirmed: AOL will acquire Socialthing