Uno de Waal

Uno de Waal’s online space covering everything about web2.0, social networks and internet related developments in South Africa and how it fits in with the rest of the world.

Socialthing: winning


 I’m trying out Socialthing and I’m really impressed with the “adding your services” task. It’s pretty quick and easy and uses a really cool interface.

One of the most interesting pieces is that they grab your Facebook news Feed, or a part of it. You’ll see that you Socialthing stream is different from your Facebook stream (the FB part). I’m also quite interested in how they do this - there is not API hook for your newsfeed (remember, it’s the juice that keeps you on FB) and it’s against the Facebook ToC’s. So Socialthing, how are you doing it?

All this got me thinking: The best Authentication pattern for me was the Flickr one - Their OAuth pattern is the way all services should work. Why does Flickr support OAuth, as well as FireEagle, but not Delicious? Hrm…

Regarding FriendFeed - I was expecting SocialThing to work in a similar way. While I might not be friends with people like Chris Messina, Brian Oberkirch or Chris Saad, I still want to follow what they are doing - which is why I use FriendFeed. I thought Socialthing would do this, but at the moment there isn’t the ability to add “people who aren’t really my friends”. I like being able to do that. While I think there are similarities between Socialthing and Friendfeed as both are Lifestreaming apps, they serve different purposes. So there might be a little bit of a gap in there, somewhere that both these apps are missing?

Socialthing also has grouping (for e.g. Twitter Messages) - something that FriendFeed guys put out as a major thang - I think that’s like… Basics. Otherwise you can use RSS, no?

Either way, a cool service. Check out some of the design patterns here below.

FriendFeed_1205153380605    socialthing!_1205152685494   socialthing!_1205139805703




One Response

  1. Matt Galligan

    11|Mar|2008

    Really glad you like it! We’ve got a lot of stuff that we’ve got planned for the next couple of weeks that should really improve it…

    Tell us if you have any ideas on http://getsatisfaction.com/socialthing


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