Socialthing Launches. And Crashes. And Launches.

I want to love Socialthing. Really, truly I do. I am not the world's biggest FriendFeed fan even though it seems everyone has already sworn allegiance to it judging by the number of times I see it added on my Facebook news feed. But FriendFeed is ugly. And I'm tired of having to find and add people everywhere I go. So imagine my glee when I opened my email this morning to find my Socialthing invite.

Socialthing is yet another entry into the now very-crowded lifestream space. As they proclaim in their blog, however, it's not just another FriendFeed clone, even if it looks that way at first.

The coolest thing about Socialthing? It already knows your friends. Rather than aggregating everyone's feeds, then having you add friends, Socialthing adds your services, and assumes that you'd like to continue being friends with the same people you are friends with on those services. So if you want to follow your Facebook friends' status updates but they aren't lifestream kind of people, it's no problem; their updates are pulled in. In addition to already figuring out who your friends are, Socialthing goes a step further and allows you to return to the originating platform to comment on something. In other words, you respond to Tweets on Twitter, and Facebook updates on Facebook. To sum it up, Socialthing isn't a social networking platform itself, but rather a tool to consolidate all your social networking in one easy-to-read format.

However, Socialthing may be TOO simple for its own good. With no social networking on the site itself, you aren't going to be able to use it to discover new people to follow; you are still going to have to do that on the original services. Perhaps more troubling is that it launched with only seven Web 2.0 services you can add to your stream. Notably missing are Ma.gnolia and general RSS feeds. I left del.icio.us for Ma.gnolia a while back, and I know I'm not the only one who did. And while LiveJournal is one of the services, it's the ONLY blogging service available. I abandoned my LiveJournal profile years back, and don't believe I'm still following anyone who hasn't moved from LiveJournal to either their own blog or a different blogging platform like TypePad or Wordpress.com. I realize this is still an invite-only beta launch, but when I'm left with only two services I can use on Socialthing (Twitter and Facebook), is it really that much more convenient for me?

I'm also pretty concerned about scaling at this point. Between the time I logged in and started setting up my profile and pulling my feeds, the TechCrunch review had already gone live, and Socialthing choked. Unlike other startups, they must have been monitoring Twitter, because my short little blip about the error received an immediate reply asking for a screenshot, and a blog post about the issue went live shortly after. Socialthing was back up and running quickly, but with only seven services and a TechCrunch article, how will it eventually scale as an open application with more services?

Lack of services and scalability aside, however, Socialthing has a great idea, a fantastic interface, and the attention to customer service that have won themselves one more fan.