AOL Said To Be Dialing Up Brizzly-Maker Thing Labs For An Acquisition
A couple months ago, a rumor was spreading around that Thing Labs (makers of the Twitter/Facebook app Brizzly) was being acquired by Foursquare. That wasn't true, it was simply speculation based on some tweets.
Context & Ripple Effects
AOL has been rebuilding its consumer-social footing through deals rather than organic products: its 2009 Socialthing-powered Lifestreaming push aimed squarely at Facebook Connect, and its expensive Bebo bet had already shown how little a big social acquisition guarantees — Bebo's traffic numbers were the cautionary tale of early 2008. A rumored approach to a tiny team like Thing Labs reads as the opposite playbook: buy small, buy talent.
The timing sits inside a Twitter-ecosystem moment: days earlier Ev Williams put the app count at 300,000 while commentary argued none of them materially matter, and Twitter itself shipped a first-party iPad app. Brizzly was one of the few clients with real brand recognition, which is why a previous rumor tied it to Foursquare — a claim that was denied before this AOL report surfaced. The AOL talks are themselves unconfirmed.
First-order effects
- If talks lead to a deal, Thing Labs' small team and the Brizzly product fold into AOL's social portfolio alongside Lifestream, giving AOL a credible Twitter/Facebook client where its own efforts have lagged.
- For Thing Labs' founders, the rumored deal offers an exit from a client market where even 300,000 apps are widely judged not to matter — a soft landing ahead of any platform squeeze from Twitter itself.
Second-order effects
- Other independent Twitter-client makers become more obvious acquisition targets, as buyers conclude that distribution on the platform is consolidating toward first-party apps and funded teams like Brizzly's.
- AOL's rivals in lifestreaming and social aggregation face pressure to match the move with their own small-team purchases rather than building clients nobody adopts.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points to acqui-hire logic replacing audience-buying in social M&A: where AOL once paid for Bebo's user base, the rumored Thing Labs deal prices a handful of engineers and a respected client above any standalone business — a structural shift for the long tail of Twitter-ecosystem startups whose endgame is absorption rather than independence.
The trend: Social-media acquisitions are shrinking from headline user-base buys to small-team acqui-hires as platforms absorb their own client ecosystems.