ABC News Bring Themselves Into the Social Web With SocialSite

During President Obama’s first address to a joint session of Congress, ABC News featured our SocialSite system on their main and politics pages. During the historic address, which dealt primarily with Obama’s plans to deal with the current economic crisis, a prominent SocialSite widget followed all the Twittering about the speech. We think this shows a giant and admirable step into the world of Web 2.0 for the mainstream media company.

ABC News Frontpage with SocialSite

The blog microblink noted ABC’s move, pointing out that although CNN had partnered with Twitter during the ending phase of last year’s presidential election, they had relied on a special Twiiter elections page, while ABC used SocialSite to embed Twitter content directly on their site , embracing the Social Web much more directly than CNN. Microblink had some good things to say about our “aptly dubbed” SocialSite system:

“The widget grabs content from any number of social media outlets and then pulls it all back into your own website. While a lot of websites are still fairly static and non-interactive, the SocialSite widget feeds fresh social content from the users talking about you and your brand.”

SocialSite from Thingfo on ABC News Politics Page

Those familiar with our widgets would note that ABC only used the Twitter feed out of many content feeds and types available with point-and-click ease. They chose to hide the “featured” and “recent” view, and enjoyed a number of great new features we’ve recently introduced. I’ll tell you all more about them soon (unless you’re one of the lucky ones to get into our private alpha!). This implementation shows just how versatile SocialSite can be.

SocialSite on ABC News!

Pretty cool. We’re looking forward to sending out some more invites and blogging about more of the innovative people using Thingfo soon!

7 Responses to “ABC News Bring Themselves Into the Social Web With SocialSite”

  1. Mike Templeton Says:

    Thanks for linking up our coverage. I think it was a very bold move for ABC to implement a tool like that, but its also great to see them actually embracing it. I’m also a big fan of how your widget pulls in content from many areas, rather than just one platform or service.

  2. Mike Grishaver Says:

    Thanks Mike. I appreciate the feedback and glad you found us. We have more in the works. Microblink is a cool blog, you have great coverage of the space.

  3. dandan Says:

    I’m glad ABC is doing this! Hope more media take the plunge like this.

    Cool looking widget! I’m signing up for an invite code, can’t wait to check it out!

  4. mike grishaver » Blog Archives » ABC News Bring Themselves Into the Social Web With SocialSite Says:

    [...] Rafael’s blog post about ABC News & Thingfo. From the Thingfo [...]

  5. radius360 Says:

    I saw this during the speech, I was watching on my laptop in a coffee shop, it was cool to watch the twitters roll in as Obama spoke. I’d never heard of ThingFo before, you guys rock!

  6. dandan Says:

    Hey, I noticed George Stephanopoulos’ show “This Week” is using your widget on their page! Looks like ABC likes you, congrats!

  7. Emily Says:

    This is right here, in the present, not the future.

Leave a Reply