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Posts Tagged ‘socialthing’

A couple weeks ago, I spotted the reincarnation of Socialthing on AOL’s country-music Website TheBoot and speculated that it would potentially be rolled out across AOL’s other MediaGlow properties as well. Today, a press release from AOL in my inbox confirms that MediaGlow “is in the process of deploying Socialthing across its network of more than 75 sites.”

Socialthing started out as a Freindfeed competitor when AOL bought it last year. It never came out of private beta, but its lifestreaming service found its way into Bebo, the social network AOL purchased for $850 million. Now, with Socialthing for Websites, AOL is combining it with AIM to compete with Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect.

As I wrote in my last post, Socialthing for Websites offers a single sign-in for participating Websites. Right now it accepts your AIM or AOL username and password, but will soon add Bebo, Facebook, Gmail, Yahoo and OpenID using OAuth. In addition to single sign-in, Socialthing creates a toolbar along the bottom of a Website that brings both group chat and private AIM chat to the site in the form of pop-up boxes, as well as a content stream that shows the latest articles and comments on the site as well as your personal lifestream of activityies from other sites.

As we saw from Facebook’s announcement yesterday to open up its own stream to developers so that they can create applications around the stream of constant updates from people’s social network, there is a battle going on to control the conversation. AOL is entering this battle with AIM and Socialthing. After it rolls Socialthing out across its own Websites, it will make Socialthing available to partner sites as well. And when it revamps AIM later this year, you can expect the Socialthing lifestream to be a big part of it.

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TrueCar, an information service launched at TechCrunch50 that aims to give potential new car buyers an idea of what the price tag of the vehicle they’re considering purchasing should really be reading, is officially launching its free consumer-focused website today by taking the beta label off.

In essence, the service allows car buyers to check if the price for their next car is on par with the price others have paid for the same vehicle in the past, hopefully bringing some transparency to the automotive retail industry.

So how does it work? When a new car buyer visits the TrueCar website, they are asked to enter their zip code and all vehicle details down to the specific options. TrueCar then generates a complete Price Report with nifty graphs, displaying the full distribution of prices paid by other people for the exact same vehicle in a given market area. In addition, the web service calculates the actual dealer cost structure of a particular vehicle.

TrueCar claims it holds data for more than 25% of all new vehicles sold throughout the United States, which is quite impressive and a high enough percentage for comparisons to be made, although we noted in our coverage from the TC50 event that the company was going to try and hold off from launching publicly when they actually reached 50%.

And where exactly does all that data come from anyway? The company says it currently processes thousands of transactions on a daily basis, from a variety of sources across the U.S., ranging from financial institutions to vehicle registration organizations that collect and store new car transactional data, to generate its Price Reports. Using this data, TrueCar is able to tell you if you’re getting a good, a great or an over-priced deal on a new car based on actual sales data and not estimates.

For the occasion, TrueCar is taking the wraps of its blog, called The Truth, where it aims to regularly report car pricing facts and trends backed by real market data. In their latest blog post, TrueCar gives some insight in the top 10 deals on new cars at this moment:

I’d say considering a Ford is probably a good start to getting a good deal.

On a sidenote: TrueCar isn’t founder and CEO Scott Painter’s only venture: the man is also co-founder of both Pricelock and BrightHouse, and also acts as founder and CEO of Zag, which recently raised $32.4 million in venture capital. One wonders where he finds time for all this.

You can see the video of his presentation of TrueCar at TC50 right here.

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