User:Rafaeldwan/thingfo

Founded in 2007 by Mike Grishaver, who previously was Director of Social Media for the Yahoo Media Group where he created blogging and social media tools used on hundreds of Yahoo properties around the world, ThingFo is a privately held, San Francisco based new media company. ThingFo's product mission is to help people connect their site and content to the social web.

In April, 2008, ThingFo introduced the ThingFo platform, a widget and API system that enabled successful websites to activate users, embed activity and community on their sites in their own look and feel, and let the site visitors publish content to the next generation of social networks. Grishaver discussed its launch and the intitial ThingFo strategy with Ian Kennedy of MyBlogLog and Yahoo shortly after launch on the Y! Developer Spotlight videocast. In July of 2008 ThingFo announced its partnership with the travel site Mobissimo and the creation of a travel social network called MobiFriends based on the Thingfo platform and API. Using Mobifriends, Mobissimo visitors can share travel plans and deals, discover fellow travelers, trade tips on favorite hotels, restaurants, bars, museums and activities in the context of their travel search. The ThingFo platform allows MobiFriends users to connect to their existing social networks and lets them broadcast (optionally) their travel plans and deals back to relevant publishing networks like Twitter.

ThingFo announced a new product in November of 2008, a badge system called SocialSite. SocialSite lets users easily create a custom feed from a wide variety of web 2.0 sources as well as streams from their own blogs or any other syndicated source. For example, a badge can contain activity related to the users site — who’s Digging their articles, bookmarking them on Delicious, Twittering about them, visiting them as a MyBlogLogger, etc. Users can add the comment feed from their blog, blog posts via RSS, an inbound blogs feed (who’s linking to them), and Flickr photos, YouTube videos and WetPaint Wiki activity feeds which fall within the search criteria they set for their SocialSite badge. While in Alpha ThingFo offers invite codes to those interested in trying Socialsite through its website.

Shortly after the launch of the SocialSite alpha, ThingFo won an award for “Best Social Justice Mashup” at MashupCamp 2008 with a SocialSite badge focused on Poverty Awareness.