SocialThing, a lifestreaming/social aggregation site, has been acquired by AOL. We currently have no information about the final price of the acquisition, but given that SocialThing was still in private beta, we assume that it was relatively low. SocialThing was founded in 2007 with $15,000 in seed capital from TechStars. AOL seems to be rather interested in the lifestreaming and aggregation business these days, as it just released its AIM BuddyUpdates yesterday.

While it is not unusual for a company to be bought up this quickly, it is interesting that SocialThing was acquired before it even came out of private beta. This could mean that AOL was less interested in the technology behind SocialThing and more in the team behind the service. SocialThing, after all, is still in such an early phase of its development that it doesn’t even support Microsoft’s Internet Explorer yet.

While SocialThing does the things it does well, it never quite got the hype and user base that its nearest direct competitor Friendfeed has been getting for the last few months. While SocialThing CEO and founder Matt Galligan pointed out to us that he doesn’t think SocialThing is actually competing with FriendFeed, the similarities between the two are just too striking.

It is true, though, that SocialThing is less focused on creating an internal community and puts more emphasis on sharing information back to the aggregated services than Friendfeed, especially since they just integrated ping.fm updates.

It will be interesting to see what AOL is going to do with this new property. Chances are that it will be integrated into AOL’s new BuddyUpdate service or that the SocialThing team will move over to work on BuddyUpdates while SocialThing itself will become a thing of the past.

On July 17, ValueClick provided lower revenue guidance of $163M to $164M and EPS guidance of 17c to 18c. The company also lowered its 2008 revenue guidance to a range of $655M to $675M, and EPS of 69c to 71c. Craig Hallum said it believes the Q2 weakness and reduced outlook are less about ValueClick and more about macroeconomic issues. Except for Google, the firm had doubts that any of the big boys of online advertising will be posting solid results and forecasting strength.

The CEO of ValueClick said, “Due to increasing macroeconomic uncertainty, we no longer anticipate the seasonal strength in ad spending we typically see in the second half of the year.” Craig Hallum expects the company will start putting its $101M buyback authorization to work sooner, rather than later. In its opinion, the dramatic decline in fundamentals has been more than captured in the stock price.

Other recent Street commentary: July 30, JP Morgan assumed coverage and downgraded ValueClick due to a lack of near-term catalysts as they expect business to remain weak through 2008. Also, on July 28, Needham said it thinks the potential for downside is limited and already priced into shares, and it thinks the company could become a takeover target. Throughout the last few months’ ValueClick options, the calls have been active on renewed takeover chatter by someone of the likes of Microsoft.

Brandjackers continue to abuse online brands using an increasing range of tactics, demonstrates brand protection firm MarkMonitor in its latest report. MarkMonitor’s latest Brandjacking Index has been released and the results show that while some headway is being made by brandholders and scrutiny by authorities to deter some types of brandjacking attacks, the perpetrators are continuing to evolve new tactics.

Instances of pay-per-click fraud, domain kiting and paid search abuse all decreased during Q4 2007, mainly due to ICANN scrutiny and aggressive legal action from brandholders. “Brandholders have proven they can fight back–we’ve witnessed an incredible turn-around in domain kiting and pay-per-click abuse,” said Irfan Salim, MarkMonitor’s President and CEO in Monday’s announcement. “This should encourage all brandholders to be vigilant about protecting their brands and their customers against evolving threats.”

Phishing attacks and cybersquatting, on the other hand, continued to rise in Q4 2007, and brandjackers are paying more attention to more mainstream industry targets including CPG, food and automotive.

The British are heading online to shop in ever increasing numbers, according to new figures from IMRG/Capgemini. Twenty percent of U.K. consumers now do their shopping on the Internet. Almost $54 billion was spent by Brits on Internet shopping in the first half of this year. That’s a rise of 38% compared with last year, revealed IMRG/Capgemini in its latest e-Retail Sales Index.

“Online shopping growth continues to out-perform the high street, as tight budgets and poor weather keep people at home where they can shop online for bargains,” said IMRG CEO James Roper. Just over half also believe that shopping online is environmentally friendly, a view shared by their movie-watching U.S. cousins.

IMRG Capgemini predicts that sustainability issues will drive between 30% and 50% of all British retail online in the next five years. “This is because, as online reaches 20% of all retail sales, retailers experience a tipping point which forces them to seriously re-think the future viability of their business model,” said Mike Petevinos, head of consulting for retail for Capgemini UK.

Social network Me.dium is putting the power of its people into a new social search system. The search tool will combine the new Yahoo Search BOSS platform with results collected from Me.dium social sidebars and toolbars. The toolbars are used by participants to share and endorse websites with others within the network, much like StumbleUpon , from which data Me.dium can rank sites based on popularity. Current figures put the number of URLs shared each day by Me.dium users at over 20 million.

As well as popularity, or crowd rank, website content will also be ranked using crowd level, recent activity and average visit duration. This information is then wrapped around the Yahoo search results.

The move should see social media websites being healthily represented in results returned by the social media search tool. More blogs and news articles will appear in the top results and more up-to-the minute content will be displayed based on what people are looking at in that moment in time, and being constantly updated in real-time.

“Me.dium’s Social Search gives you a new and unique layer of information that was never available before,” said Kimbal Musk , CEO of Me.dium. “Using the activity of our community and our real time technology platform, users see search results ranked by what the crowds are surfing right now.”

Yahoo! Inc. (YHOO) was quick to shoot down unsubstantiated rumors that CEO Jerry Yang was stepping down on Wednesday. It wasn’t the first time such reports have cropped up, and it probably won’t be the last. While we’ll take Yahoo!’s word, for now, that Yang has no intention of resigning, it’s certainly not out of the realm of possibility that the company’s co-founder could choose to abandon his post. Within the next couple of weeks, Yahoo! should have a pretty good idea how it’s doing in its proxy fight with activist investor Carl Icahn.

Source: Tech Confidential

Personalized home page service Netvibes has quietly rolled out a new social feature called Buzz. The Buzz section tracks what links are getting starred the most throughout Netvibes network of home pages.

Netvibes users can star any of the links they like on their homepages, RSS readers, YouTube boxes, Digg widgets, and other widgets. And when items have been starred, they show up in users’ public activity streams, which can be displayed on home pages using an activity widget. With Buzz, these starrings are aggregated and displayed on a Digg-like front page where people can see what others are starring the most.

Buzz hasn’t been formally announced yet, but this is the first new feature we’ve since Tariq Krim announced he was stepping down from his CEO position.

While Netvibes lags behind giants iGoogle, My Yahoo! and MyAOL, it is the favorite among many early adopters for being fast and ad-free. With 2.4 million worldwide uniques in May, it makes sense to leverage its traffic for a link popularity tracker. There are already many social bookmarking sites, but adding a feature like this to an already-popular personalized home page service makes for easy adoption.

Buzz is currently on a separate page (and probably still in development), but we expect Netvibes to provide users with a widget that can be used to track popular items on their home pages. The name choice probably won’t go unnoticed by Yahoo either.

Source: Techcrunch

EMI Music filed a lawsuit alleging “massive and blatant” copyright infringement by Hi5, VideoEgg and ten John Doe defendants to be named later. The core of the suit is over copyrighted EMI content that appears on Hi5, particularly music videos. In the recent past, they’vd sued or threatened to sue AllofMP3, YouTube, Apple, MP3Tunes, XM Radio, Infospace (can’t really blame them there) and even The Beatles.

VideoEgg, for example, provided video functionality to Hi5 in the past, but the deal ended in April 2008, and they no longer work together. The ten John Doe defendants are presumably other service providers, and/or executives of Hi5, VideoEgg and those other companies. The fact that EMI included VideoEgg in the lawsuit shows that they care little about current infringement - they just want a payoff for stuff that happened in the past.

VideoEgg CEO Matt Sanchez says that they comply with all DMCA takedown demands, but never received one from EMI. VideoEgg also used AudibleMagic , he says, to identify and proactively removed copyrighted material.

VentureBeat is reporting Microsoft is very close to buy the semantic search engine Powerset. The purchase price is rumored to be slightly more than $100 million. An announcement is expected next month. Powerset, of San Francisco, has developed a technology that attempts to understand the full meanings of phrases you type in while searching, and it returns results based on that understanding.

By buying Powerset, Microsoft is hoping to close the perceived quality gap with Google’s search engine. The move comes as Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer continues to argue that improving search is Microsoft’s most important task. Microsoft’s market share in search has steadily declined, dropping further and further behind first-place Google and second place Yahoo.

The group controlling Internet domain names may soon decide whether to relax naming rules and potentially open up a virtual domain name gold rush. Paul Twomey is president and CEO of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.

At a meeting in Paris Thursday, the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers will vote on two key proposals. The first would allow domains that do not use Latin characters, meaning domain names using Chinese, Arabic or Cyrillic letters. The other proposal would allow domains to use nearly any letter or number combination, up to 64 characters.

If ICANN approves the proposals, the world of .com and .org and country names like .jp or .fr would be opened to a much wider choice, such as .hotel or .sex. Just the thought of .sex has bloggers predicting an auction frenzy, as almost any word in any language could become a domain name extension.

“You can almost guarantee the most highly sought-after one will, unfortunately, probably be dot-sex,” said Bryan Glick of Computing Magazine.

“All the meaningful words and meaningful names in the English language have been bought up already,” Glick said. Watch Glick further explain the significance of such a move »

“This is why you see new companies being formed with made-up, strangely sounding names … in order to get a unique Web domain for it.”

ICANN has turned down requests for .xxx, which would be used by adult sites, over fear of seeming to give approval of pornography sites. Analysts say .xxx and nearly everything else would be possible if the rules are relaxed.

Among the exceptions would be trademarked domains, such as .cnn or .microsoft not being on general sale.

But the more generic .hotel or .flight could set off a bidding war similar to when .tv was put up for sale by the Pacific island of Tuvalu.