aggregator

Confirmed: AOL will acquire Socialthing

AOL's People Networks division, formed when the company acquired Bebo, has picked up a new friend: Socialthing, a Boulder, Colo.-based start-up that aggregates social feeds from sites like Digg, Twitter, and Flickr.

The acquisition has not yet been completed, but is close to it.

No financial details have yet been released regarding the acquisition of Socialthing, which falls into the same niche as FriendFeed and is still in private beta. The company is a new one; it emerged out of Boulder's TechStars incubator and had its official launch party at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in … Read more

Newsflashr.com aggregates the aggregators

In the category of yet-another-news-tracker, Newsflashr.com added search engine to its news aggregation service, which was launched in February this year. It searches across feeds from popular news-oriented sites, such as Yahoo News, Google News, Digg, MSNBC and even Twitter, delivering results by source.

Newsflashr.com doesn't offer filtering mechanisms, except ranking sites via Alexa, which is an unrefined indication of popularity rather than relevance to the search result. "Our approach is to leave it to the user to compare between the services," said Gal Arav, founder of Newsflashr.com.

Newsflashr.com also lets users search … Read more

PageOnce iPhone app organizes your bills, life

Personal organizer PageOnce has a great iPhone application that I think many will find to be incredibly useful. Like its desktop sibling, PageOnce for iPhone is a feed aggregator the likes of Netvibes or MyYahoo. The only difference is that you're feeding it account information for utilities and services to get a quick overall view of your various balances and spending activity.

I've been using the application for the past few days, and have come to rely on it almost exclusively to keep track of bank accounts, mobile phone usage, and my Netflix queue. In fact, it's … Read more

Swurl lets you blog without writing anything

Swurl is a service for people who want to create a blog made from their activity on various social-media services. Like FriendFeed, SocialThing, or any other aggregator, you start building your Swurl blog by plugging in your usernames on each service. There are currently 19 to choose from, with all the usual suspects like Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, Amazon, and Yelp.

What's nice is that Swurl will retroactively seek out all your old posts and filter them in. Each post is set up by your day of activity, so if you didn't add anything to any of these services … Read more

Track best sellers with SmashBuys

Like top ten lists? You might like SmashBuys, a link aggregator of the best selling items on the Web. Sites included are Amazon, iTunes, VGchartz, and Downloads from Webware's sister site Download.com. There are nine in all, and clicking any link will send you straight to the product page. You can also hover over any item to learn more about it.

It was pitched to us as a PopUrls for products, which is very true, although Smashbuys users have the added benefit of seeing how popular each link is with the community. Items that get more clicks get … Read more

Streetread organizes ticker symbols and business news in one place

Start your day out every morning by reading your favorite financial feeds? You might like Streetread, a relatively simple feed aggregator that pulls in stories from major financial publications. It also grabs live quotes from your favorite ticker symbols.

While you could accomplish a similar feat with services like Alltop, Original Signal, and Netvibes, Streetread's claim to fame is that it's constantly updating and will keep the page alive and scolling downwards as new stories pop up. You can preview each headline before you click, or just click it without getting lost--it'll simply jump you off site … Read more

OurSignal puts the follies of social news all in one place

On Wednesday morning, I read about a new site called OurSignal, which mashes up the top headlines from Digg, Reddit, Delicious, and HackerNews, promising to show a more diverse array of what the Web's recommending. Kind of like OriginalSignal for social news.

Unfortunately, when I loaded up OurSignal, staring me in the face was "Goatse In Spore," a reference to an extremely crude graphical Web meme (don't Google it, please). Not exactly the kind of top headline I was looking for.

The concept is kind of cool: "warm" colors mean a story is gaining … Read more

Content aggregator Loud3r launches network of sites

Loud3r, a start-up content aggregator that we saw present at the Under the Radar conference earlier this month, officially launched its network of content sites Tuesday morning. The launch includes 25 focused sites, all of which share the "3r" branding. In addition to more mainstream-sounding New3r (which covers gadgets and tech) and Glitt3r (fashion), the company's portfolio includes sites focused on enthusiast niches, such as sneakers (Sneak3r), skateboarding (Grind3r), and martial arts (Fight3r).

The sites use a combination of human input and an automated semantic engine in an attempt to suss out not only the most relevant … Read more

OneSpot feeds publishers' content

If you don't have content to populate your site, OneSpot has some for you. The Austin-based start-up joins a host of other companies in the business of delivering contextual links for publishers. OneSpot CEO Matt Cohen makes the claim that OneSpot "democratizes vertical or affinity publishing, helping anyone find, select, and deliver links to the best content on the Web."

OneSpot sifts through more than 200,000 RSS feeds to make content selections. Users provide the system with a set of sample sites, and OneSpot identifies related feeds, looking at link overlaps, Cohen told me. The selected … Read more

Huffington Post to get painted green

The Huffington Post, the news aggregation and commentary site founded by political pundit Arianna Huffington and former AOL exec Ken Lerer, is finally jumping on the post-Al-Gore bandwagon.

The company announced Wednesday that it will be launching HuffPost Green, a site division specific to "green" content through a content partnership with Discovery Communications' Planet Green channel as well as TreeHugger, the popular eco-news blog that Discovery acquired last year.

If you're like me, your reaction to this news might've been, "What? You mean there isn't a 'green' section already?" The New York-based Huffington … Read more