Why Does AOL Need Two Lifestreaming Services, SocialThing and Buddyupdates?

Today Caroline McCarthy reports that the rumors about AOL buying SocialThing have been confirmed. Frank Gruber has provided some of the background details about how the startup made its first steps and finally reached this acquisition.

SocialThing is a startup that serves as an aggregator for various online services (not many of them for now with a strange omission of regular RSS feeds). SocialThing is obviously one of the competitors to Friendfeed but even after some grudge on the launch date the majority of bloggers admitted SocialThing was actually better than FriendFeed at least because it already knows your friends from other services and allows you to follow them immediately instead of following the here as well.

Unfortunately no one is willing to mention the financial details of the acquisition but I can imagine the price should be in the range of several millions but probably under $5M (hardly higher given the recent budget concerns over AOL). What’s more, there are some conditions (also undisclosed) that need to be satisfied for the acquisition to be actually completed but I hope they will not be an obstacle for the deal to close.

To me this is a pretty strange development given that only recently we have discussed that AOL launched (without heavy PR or marketing) a lifestreaming service of its own, buddyupdates, intended for us to track updates from our AIM buddies. But I think that it only proves that AOL is very serious about tracking the hottest trends and acting fast to satisfy demands from users.

It is obvious that the competition in the lifestreaming/social feeds aggregation has grown to be immense and now that Facebook has introduced a useful range of filters for its news feed that serves as an aggregator that you can access right within Facebook this competition has a very big player in. But the development over at Facebook also proves that the future of lifestreaming and aggregation is not with standalone services - they are mostly needed in social networks where users spend time anyway and must enjoy additional opportunities to track activities of their friends as well.

So it is quite understandable that AOL is not buying SocialThing to grow the service on its own - it will definitely be integrated into other AOL products. My immediate guess here is that AOL is planning to use the two lifestreaming services it will have when the acquisition of Socialthing is completed in two very different ways: while buddyupdates will continue to serve as a service for AIM users to track what their contacts are doing, Socialthing will be integrated into recently acquired Bebo to offer the level of lifestreaming integration that will probably be even better than what Facebook now offers with the news feed. And given the level of service that SocialThing offers on its own, combined with the basic functionality of Bebo it will probably become even more useful to the end users.