Dave, having just bought one of these Pogoplug thingys, maybe I can answer a few of your questions.

A couple of reasons:

Storing data in the cloud is great, but can sometimes be unreliable. If you cut out the middle man, and allow a device to connect directly to a computer or storage device, then you're way better off.

Also, in the event that you have a computer running just so that you can have data accessible (like through Soonr), that's a computer that has to stay running (and seemingly reliable) for 24/7. The Pogoplug means that I can plug in a simple USB hard drive and just let it do its things. Now I don't have rely on Dropbox or the like to "trust" that things got synced. Also, since it's in my own closed network, I can trust that only I can access the data, and it's not stored in the cloud somewhere.

Lastly, have you ever tried to upload 80 gigs of music to the cloud? Yeah, not so much fun. BUT, it's something that I'd love to do because it'd make my music library far more "up to date" across all of my computers.

Not to mention someone that's on the go like me, where I'd love to be able to access all of the photos and video I take no matter where I'm at.

This is great stuff.

So one thing to note:

Socialthing "For Websites" is a wholly different project and team altogether. The other team, that is working on the Lifestreaming part of Socialthing has been the same all along (pre and post acquisition).

Right now, there was no way that the original infrastructure that was built for socialthing.com would have ever been able to support a userbase as large as AOL has. So the (original) Socialthing team has been cranking on the new back end to support many more users. Alternatively, another team had been created to build the Socialthing for Websites product.

Hope this helps...

Maria, our intention is to only pull the plug when there's a comparable release by the Socialthing team. We still use the product too, so we're working on something even better...

Everyone...thanks for responding...

Please check out our most recent blog post http://blog.socialthing.com/2009/04/27/times-they... to see what's going on.

We've been very inactive, but mostly because we've had to keep our mouths shut about what we're working on. Hoping that as we get new things up and running, we'll keep you very informed...

Thanks for your support...

Joe, I'd encourage you to check out my recent blog post:

http://blog.socialthing.com/2009/04/27/times-they...

The sole reason that nothing has changed was because it was completely intentional. We simply aren't able to support the old site while we build a back end that can support hundreds of million users.

We fully recognize that the other "competitors" in this space are doing great things...after the purchase by AOL, our roadmap changed completely, so that we might bring Lifestreaming to the masses and go big with it...

Zenbu is so great. I went there last September. Ended up having to sit at the sushi bar because all the seats were taken, but it was likely a MUCH better experience because of it. Our sushi chef made us all kinds of neat creations. You missed out on the Flaming Volcano Roll though! The white wine / raspberry / pear creation that he made us was great.

Good choice!

Unfortunately Facebook doesn't expose that via the API so we're not actually able to do that, and until they add it to their API functions, we won't be able to. I would really love to see that ability, but as of right now, it's not there...

Yup...but as we grew we started to realize more and more things...but most of all, understanding that we got acquired by AOL, we have to prepare ourselves for that large of a userbase.

Alrighty everyone...check out our most recent post on our blog post for an update!, http://blog.socialthing.com/2008/11/23/time-for-a...

Congrats guys! That's super exciting...glad to see that it worked out for you and it's very cool that there's more and more focus on Boulder these days!