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Interview: Socialthing! Founder Matt Galligan

recently people have been comparing lifestreaming services friendfeed and socialthing!, worrying to determine which one will convince or whether they even compete. as regards example, see readwriteweb’s post friendfeed vs socialthing!. i signed up for friendfeed when it first came out and more recently i was lucky enough to get a private beta invite for socialthing! as well-spring. i sat down with socialthing! founder and ceo matt galligan, to tease a little insight into the differences and similarities between the two products.

This is a guest post by Muhammad Saleem, a social media consultant and a top-ranked community member on multiple social news sites.

Kevin connelly

How would you describe Socialthing! in simple terms?

Socialthing!’s goal is to be what we call a “digital life manager”. It’s a place that you will see the things that you and your friends are doing, interact with them (while those interactions publish to the originator of the content) and also be able to create content from the interface while it publishes to all the networks you might be a part of)

Many people see FriendFeed and Socialthing! as serving a very similar purpose. Do you think Socialthing! is in competition with FriendFeed or do you feel that they are two separate audiences and the services can coexist? If so, how do you see each being used simultaneously? If not why or how do you think Socialthing! is better than FriendFeed or Ping.fm?

I think that Socialthing! and FriendFeed are two very different things. Socialthing! is a digital life manager, a single place that you will go to manage the networks that you’re a part of elsewhere. FriendFeed is a place that you go to create meaningful conversation around content. The aggregation of the content means that everything that’s in there can be conversed around. The conversation stays inside of FriendFeed for good reason, because elsewhere, it may be out of context.

Socialthing! isn’t necessarily better or worse than FriendFeed, just different. They’re two very different value propositions, and it just depends on how you want to interact with your networks, and whether or not you think adding another network into the confusion is a good/bad thing. As for distinctions with Ping.fm, they are just simply a publisher of status, much like Profilactic’s 155+ isn’t only because of Allergies Related Drugs our lack of the time that we’ve been on the market, and us being in private beta. It’s because the services do very different things with those services. One is that we don’t just aggregate a feed, but rather, aggregate your feed, all of your friends, and all of the things that they’ve been doing on those services. This is an incredible amount of more work. This means that there has to be a solid UI to support it, especially considering information overload. It also means that there has to be a scalable way to be able to fetch so many friends at once. One thing that’s also very different about our infrastructure is that we do live calls to the sites when the user comes to our site, so that for certain services that make more sense to have it, the information is fresh, rather than 20+ minutes old. For sites like Twitter, this is of utmost importance.

Now, going forward we do intend on adding services at a very rapid pace, but we are also letting our community vote on these services. Since helping manage peoples’ digital lives is our game, we need to make sure we have all of the most important services implemented, so we’re including a Digg-like voting mechanism soon that will take care of this and let us know which services are most important to our users.

We’re also planning on going far beyond just doing basic social services that have explicit content being generated, but we’ll be elaborating more on this later.

As for the profile page, we’ll be implementing this soon, and we’ll have more details on it also

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