So it’s been a little while since we announced the acquisition…and most likely, you might be wondering to yourself what is going on with SocialThing. Well, first off you might have noticed that I didn’t type a “!” there after “SocialThing” but I’ll get to that in a bit…

Since the acquisition we’ve been busy, very busy. There’s a lot planned for SocialThing and that’s most of why I wanted to come in here and assure everyone that we’re A-OK and ready to rock!

First off, SocialThing is here to stay. AOL has loved what we’ve done with the site, and the recognize that it’s a powerful tool, thus they don’t want to take that away from everyone. But the bigger thing is, how do we make it better/bigger/awesomer?

Pretty simple…newer, more badass website, iPhone app, desktop app, API, you name it. There’s a whole lot on the roadmap …we’re crazy excited and ready to crank! Obviously these things will take time, so there’s no target dates for any of this stuff, but we’re definitely not floundering as a result of the acquisition. Quite the opposite, actually…our resolve has never been better! We’ve heard all of your suggestions loud and clear and we’re going to do everything we can to incorporate them into the next revisions an altogether new version. Most importantly, we’re going to continue to iterate and provide new services, so rest assured, we’re here to stay!

All that being said, SocialThing is about to go through an evolution of the brand. We’ve loved SocialThing from the beginning, but we’re ready to take it further. We’re ready to take it out of the “twitterati” and into the mainstream. We’re ready to “grow up” and with that, revising the brand was super-important. So here’s the explanation:

The exclamation is gone. Gone, finito, bye-bye, etc. We were fond of it, but truth be told, it was pretentious. Oh yeah and it was kind of annoying to type “!” after every single time we said SocialThing. Also, I guess we’ll write it “SocialThing” from now on…simply because that seemed to be the most well-adopted way to “spell our name”.

But once we got rid of the exclamation point, unfortunately it seemed a bit plain. Not to mention the fact that the whole “speech bubble” thing has been a little overdone. Um…way over done. So let’s get rid of that! Oh yeah, and the text seems to be really heavy on the right side (read:bold). Last, the box around the words seems pretty huge, so let’s tighten things up a bit…

And there we had it…but hmm…it started to get really too plain. It wasn’t unique anymore, there wasn’t any flair, no excitement. So we started working on something altogether new.

We wanted to convey the excitement of SocialThing without the “!”. We wanted to be colorful without the typical “web 2.0” gradient. We wanted to be bubbly without having a speech bubble logo. So how do you convey all of that into a logo without being crazy busy?

So we ended up with:

Voila!

PS …the “lines of awesome” (as coined by Bebo engineer, Steve Cohen) aren’t going to be there all the time, just here…to…convey awesome.

The new logo is everything we wanted:

Exciting without the “!”, colorful without being overpowering, it allows itself to be any color and still work, it does everything we were looking for. Beyond that, we feel like it’s a solidly unique logo. It’s much more “summer blockbuster movie” than “web 2.0”, and we, for one, like that! Finally, it works better big, small, any size in between. It leads itself to working practically anywhere, and seeing as how you might start seeing “Powered by SocialThing” in the near future, it needed to be that for us.

We hope you like it, and if you’ve got any feedback on it at all, please let us know!

UPDATE: Some folks wanted to see a little less “Wham! Laundry Detergent-esque” version…here’s a flat black version:

You my have seen the rumors, the leaks, etc. and while we just had to sit here and watch it all go down, we wanted nothing more than to tell the entire world how excited we are.

This post has been a long time coming and we’re very excited to say that we’re in the last few days of being acquired by AOL. There’s so many questions that I know everyone is asking, so I was hoping to answer a decent amount of them here. Also, you are more than welcome to jump in and toss your comments our way; we will do everything to get your questions answered.

One thing I want to note before I really go into anything else was what this meant to us. Obviously there’s a part of it that’s just simply nice to say that we (as entrepreneurs, engineers and novices to the internet startup game) have had a success. Being acquired at such an early stage is a pretty good validation that we are onto something really hot. But beyond all of that, at the end of the day, we just wanted do something that was both beneficial to us, and our users. On one hand that may have meant raising more money, continuing down the path we were going down and just cranking away at the product we’ve worked on for more than a year now. But the other opportunity was being able to jump right into a big company, not have the worry of raising money, have the infrastructure and servers to be able to scale to a much larger audience than before, and most of all, have the freedom to make a much better experience for our users.

I know the biggest question asked will be “So what happens to Socialthing! now?” so I thought I’d get that out of the way first:

While for some time we’ll be cranking away on improving our back end to improve stability and scalability, we’re wanting to keep the experience much of the same way that it is today. We’ll continue to work on Socialthing! …developing new features, integrating more services and building a better back end.

But with these kinds of acquisitions come some really cool opportunities. Specifically speaking, 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. 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 along side the team.

There’s going to be a whole lot more about what we’re up to soon…but for now…let us know your questions! We’d love to hear them!

We’ve got so many people to thank, so I’m just going to toss in the obligatory “acceptance speech” list here:

TechStars for giving us the most amazing opportunity. They saw something special in us and gave us the opportunity we needed to really building something cool. Also, a special thanks to all the TechStars teams for all of your support…

Jason Mendelson. This guy is amazing. The day that we met him, he told us he didn’t believe in what we were doing, didn’t think it’d go anywhere, and we were going to have to prove him wrong. And prove him wrong, we did indeed. Jason is one of the managing partners over at the Boulder-based venture capital firm, Foundry Group. He was one of our early mentors, and now one of our biggest cheerleaders. It’s been an absolute pleasure being able to work with him.

eonBusiness for helping us out with our first investment round. From the first day that we met eon, we knew that they were the right kind of partner for us to work with for investment. Dave and Rob were both incredibly knowledgeable about the business aspects, while Frank acted as a mentor to our development team…helping us through scaling issues and more.

Robert Reich and the Denver/Boulder New Tech Meetup for being such a cornerstone in building the Boulder tech community up to where it is today. When we presented for the first time in August of 2007, there was only about 100 people in the room, but just last week we saw such an incredible turnout that more than 50 people had standing room only.

Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado for giving us an opportunity to give back to the community that made us who we are. Earlier this year, we pledged 1% of our equity to the EFCo so that we might be able to have a direct hand in building a better, stronger entrepreneurial community.

Frank Gruber for providing so many companies with the opportunity to show their stuff to the locals. Frank runs TechCocktail, a shindig where a bunch of geeks show up, show their stuff, and get their drink on.

Dave Morin for being a personal mentor to me, as well as an incredible mind to tap when we just needed someone to bounce ideas off of.

All of our partners that we work with on a regular basis for integration…because without them, Socialthing! wouldn’t exist. We’ve loved working with companies like Facebook, Twitter and the many others that deserve our praise.

And of course, last but not least… AOL. While we’ve seen some dark years in the AOL universe, the company that we got acquired by is a very different company than they were those years ago. We’re so excited about the opportunity that we have in front of us, as well as very happy that someone saw in Socialthing! what has made us excited for so long.

There’s so many people that I’m sure we’re missing here, but without a doubt, we’d also like to thank our friends, family and everyone else who has helped us along the way.

While the journey now ends for the company known as Socialthing, Inc., the journey has just started for Socialthing! and the many other products we intend to give the “Socialthing! touch” to inside of AOL. We’re excited to have this opportunity and can’t wait to show AOL and the world what we’re made of. Thanks to everyone.

As we continue to crank along on some back end changes to make the Socialthing! experience even better, we decided to drop a few features that everyone out there can actually play with. So without further ado:

Ping.fm
We added Ping.fm support so that you can post to your Ping.fm account (and all the accounts you have it configured with) right from the Socialthing! posting interface. Check out their blog post about it Here. If you don’t have an invite to Ping.fm, you can sign up there with the invite code, “socialthing”.

Color Coating
In an effort to make Socialthing! easier to read and digest, we have added the ability to change the color of the bar in which your friends’ names appear. Just click on the color swatch icon, pick a color, and voila!

Contact Management
Ah, the return of old features killed off by 2.0. One thing that was popular in the previous release was the ability to rename contacts, and thus, combine their various social media accounts into one within the Socialthing! interface. We quickly realized, however, that the interface for doing this was very poor…so we spent some time on revising it, and eventually came up with something much better.

While contacts that are already a part of Socialthing! will be combined for you, other contacts without a Socialthing! account can be managed by clicking the little arrow at the far right corner of their title bar. From there, you can click “Manage Contact” and then away you go!

Going forward, we plan to continue to release more features, and more importantly, services. We have been working hard on the back end to be able to support more services, as well as developing the ability to integrate many services quickly. We hope you like these features and as always, let us know what you think about them either by leaving a comment here, or by commenting over at our Satisfaction page.

Hey everyone…we’re currently down for just a bit longer while we prep our feature release. We’re hoping to be back up sometime shortly…

Me. My name is Brian Burns. I’m here as the newest (albeit minor member) of the Socialthing! team… helping them out with their blog. The idea is that, well, they’re busy. They’re busy pumping out new updates, and busy doing all the crazy things startups have to do at the tail end of private beta. The blog is nice, and it’s filled with helpful updates and tips. But it doesn’t have a lot of personality. It doesn’t talk about what Socialthing! really is, and it doesn’t talk about who the people behind it really are.

And that’s too bad. It’s too bad because Socialthing! is a cool product, and there are some cool people working on it. It’s exciting stuff, and they’re exciting people. It deserves more attention, and they deserve more pub. I’ll do my best to give both their due.

So… stay tuned here to see some good stuff. Some good stuff about why Socialthing! exists, and why Socialthing! rocks (because it does). In the meantime, make sure you’re following Socialthing! on twitter (@socialthing), and if you aren’t already, make sure you’re following me on twitter (@brianlburns).

See you around!