It's a Socialthing: AOL's Plan To Take On Facebook Connect With Lifestreaming and Chat
If you want to take a peek at how AOL plans to take on Facebook, you need to look beyond Bebo (the social network it bought for $850 million last year) to theBoot, a country music site hidden away off in a corner of AOL Music.
Context & Ripple Effects
Two years ago, kottke.org argued Facebook was becoming the new AOL — the walled-garden portal of its era — and AOL has been trying to answer that critique from both directions since. It paid $850 million for Bebo in 2008 even though BoomTown's read on Bebo's numbers suggested they were not so big, and now it is building a second, quieter answer: Socialthing, a lifestreaming-and-chat layer meant to compete with Facebook Connect.
What makes this story notable is where AOL chose to pilot it: not on Bebo, its flagship social property, but on theBoot, a country music site tucked inside AOL Music. That placement suggests AOL is treating distributed identity — activity feeds and chat embedded across its content properties — as a separate bet from its owned social network.
First-order effects
- Socialthing puts AOL into direct competition with Facebook Connect for the distributed-identity role: instead of sending traffic to a Facebook login wall, AOL's own sites get lifestreaming and chat built in, keeping users and activity data on AOL properties.
- Bebo's role gets more complicated — AOL now has two social strategies under one roof, and testing the Connect challenger outside Bebo implies the $850 million acquisition alone is not carrying the social plan.
Second-order effects
- If Socialthing rolls out across AOL Music and other content verticals, publishers inside and beyond AOL face a choice between Facebook Connect and a rival identity layer, which pressures Facebook on the terms it offers partners.
- Lifestreaming aggregators — services that pull a user's activity across multiple networks into one feed — gain a major-media patron if AOL commits, shifting them from niche tools to strategic infrastructure.
Third-order effects
- The deeper contest is over who owns the identity layer of the open web: platforms like Facebook want every site to authenticate through them, while portals like AOL want to federate identity across their own networks — the outcome shapes whether third-party logins consolidate around one company or stay contested.
- For big media companies, the pattern points toward treating social features as embeddable infrastructure across content brands rather than as destination networks — a structural shift away from betting everything on a single acquired social site.
The trend: Distributed social identity — lifestreaming and cross-site chat as an alternative to single-platform login walls — is emerging as the next battleground between portals and Facebook.