I had a chat with Matt Galligan at the Web 2.0 Expo about the new version of his social network aggregator SocialThing. And now, just a few weeks later, the alpha is up for QA.
The new SocialThing looks much more advanced than it’s rival FriendFeed.
The next generation of the site now groups all of your friends activities into a nice little box. You can even favorite or respond to certain services like or . The new tabbed-interface feels familiar to the advanced social web user. SocialThing will check to see if new updates have been posted and then prompt you about if you want to see it.
Your personal settings have also improved. You can filter your friendstream by time, or person, and choose how often it updates.
They have setup a place where you can vote new services onto the site too.
SocialThing, FriendFeed, Iminta, Profilactic, and other social aggregator sites seem cool, but there is almost no incentive to login unless you’re bored. It’s really hard to interact with these sites and not go crazy. The new SocialThing looks to be the best one so far.
We barely have enough time to check our personal mail throughout the day, let alone logging into all these websites. Galligan has the right idea, and I think it will be a success.
How will these sites bring the communities together so they are actually interesting? I can’t imaging if Plurk started aggregating all of your social network data into their horizontal puddle of goo.
