Socialthing!
Socialthing! is a social aggregation website that has functionalities that are very similar to Friendfeed.  Socialthing! reports when users update their Twitter profile, upload photos to Flickr, Diggs a story, listens to music on Last.fm and updates a message on Pownce.  Socialthing! was started by Ben Brightwell and Matt Galligan in Boulder, CO last year. 

Socialthing! was in private beta when they were acquired. The reason for the acquisition may revolve around AOL’s interest in hiring Socialthing!’s team members more than owning the company itself.

TACODA / Advertising.com Roll-Up
AOL bought TACODA for $275 million last summer.  The reason why TACODA is shutting down and being rolled into another AOL advertising subsidiary, Platform A is because both companies were buying the same advertisement inventory from the same third party companies.  Platform A’s Advertising.com has a larger reach, so it did not make sense to have multiple contracts between two companies under the same subsidiary.

TACODA had a difficult time integrating with Platform A is because many employees quit or was laid off after the acquisition.  During the time of the acquisition, TACODA had 97 employees and now only 35 are left. 

Some of TACODA’s featured members include Associated Press, CBS, DowJones, Earthlink, eBay, Food Network, HGTV, Hoovers, HowStuffWorks, IAC, Kelley Blue Book, NBC, The New York Times, Parenthood.com, and USA Today.

Related Links:
1. ReadWriteWeb
2. paidContent

AOL announced its official acquisition announcement on July 24th.  “Behavioral targeting is a fast-growing part of the advertising business, as marketers increasingly look to get efficient and measurable results from their advertising dollars. With Tacoda, we can offer advertisers state-of-art targeting tools,” stated AOL’s Chairman and CEO, Randy Falco.

According to the NY Post, the deal is rumored to be worth around $200-$300 million.

This acquisition proves AOL’s interest to remain hyper-competitive in the contextual advertising market that major players, Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Google are remain dominant in.  Yahoo! bought BlueLithium a couple days ago and and acquired Right Media in April.  Google bought DoubleClick for $3.1 billion in April 2007.  And Microsoft bought aQuantive for $6 billion.

Through this acquisition, it appears that AOL has an intention to compete with Google, yet Google powers AOL’s search.  Google bought $1 billion worth of AOL’s shares and gained 5% ownership in December 2005.  So technically speaking, AOL is competing with one of their own company owners.  Contextual advertising competition on the Internet today can be a funny place.  Rather than working with one another, everyone just wants to grab each others contextual throats.