Just got my SocialThing invite. Thank you. Signed in. First thing it wants are my Twitter and Facebook passwords.
Dudes, I don't know you this well. Err, actually -- I don't know anyone this well.
Yes, I know you want my Twitter password "to use the API." In other words, to fetch my followers? To tweet on my behalf? Will you store this? Will you tweet an ad for your service? What's all this? Not only do you ask for my password, you won't tell me how you'll use it?
And how the hell did you manage to make Facebook ask for my Facebook password when I'm logged in? Just grab an infinite session key. It requires me to check a box and hit OK. This thing made me suspicious and queasy.
And you know what? FriendFeed and MyBlogLog didn't ask me for any passwords. And they had lots more services for me to fill in than Twitter and Facebook.
So anyway. I left it at that for now. Perhaps I'll check back some time later to see if you still want my passwords.
I'd love to know what the upcoming services will be that will be included in SocialThing. A suggestions page would be nice. I'd like to have the option to include my friend's blog/RSS feeds (though as there is no "central" blog-SN, it makes things trickier, I agree), Seesmic videos, del.icio.us links, Google Reader Shared items.
Are there technical constraints preventing you from adding them, or is it just that it takes time? Would be nice to know what's in the works, what's not going to happen, etc.
Posting to Twitter, Pownce, and Facebook all at once gives the "is twittering" in the Facebook status. When posting to Facebook by itself, it doesn't show the "is twittering". Not a big deal. I just know that some people get annoyed by the "is twittering" thing anyway.
Also, I was able to authorize Facebook's posting permissions from the Lifestream post tab, but not through the iPhone app. I was using the iPhone app when I saw the Tweet update about Facebook. Right away I started searching Facebook to find the permissions setting and couldn't find it. All good though, it's fun trying to figure stuff out.
Why can't we add generic RSS feeds to our lifestream? (this will be valuable when we have RSS for our lifestreams) You could implement some kind of claiming system to prove the rss feeds belong to the user... so that lifestream won't turn into a regular feed reader. ;)
We could then provide an image to act as icon and the title and URL would be specified in the feed. (or could be overruled by us entering other title/url?).
If I'm not mistaken, the original beta invite email I recieved said that Socialthing! would work best in Safari and IE. So far it's working good in all the browsers I've used. Currently using Firefox 3 Beta 3.
Looking forward to test out any Socialthing! browser apps in the future.
Just got feedback from some of my friends that Socialthing! seems kind of stalkerish. It's a narrowminded point of view, but a screenshot of all a person's network feeds kinda gave off that vibe lol. It's really hard to get anyone I know interested in social networking.